It’s a sad time for small businesses. As we try to grow, the companies that support our online efforts are slowly closing the internet’s freemium model. While still popular, freemium – the popular marketing technique for online services where there is an initial free version of the product with limited features and multiple tiered pay versions – seems to be slowly dying or diminishing. The latest of these cases is in Google Apps.
Starting May 10th (That’s in 5 days), Google will no longer allow Free Google Apps users to register up to 50 email accounts for free. Instead, that number will diminish significantly to 10 free users. While 10 is still a lot of users, it will make small clubs and organizations look elsewhere for their full service utility tools. Google, looking to monazite more business dollars, will be adding in additional help in exchange for lowering the user allottment.
According to Business Insider, Google will be improving its feature set to assist small businesses in setting up their accounts. Incrimental improvements will bring the signup time from over an hour, to about an hour, and eventually a signup that takes “just minutes” to convert.
Update: Google has also been busy upping the limit on contacts, and increasing the amount of notes you can take. Perhaps they’re throttling down the amount of users to give each one of them additional space for contacts, etc.
In our experience with Google Apps, it has been a wonderful suite for our small business. Email, Documents, Calendars and a plethora of free and pay applications on the Google Apps platform allow for DDT to effectively and easily manage our workflow, schedule meetings, and send quick and easy emails with a great interface.
The moral of the story: If you don’t yet have Google Apps, get it now! We’ll setup your small business with Google Apps for only $20 per user, a 1 time fee. It’s much cheaper than paying for accounts down the road at $50 per year!
What do you think of Google’s change? Is it fair, or are they cutting small business benefits at just the wrong time?
