For clarity, the change follows a decision in early 2022 to move all grandfathered G Suite Legacy users off of the free plan. Essentially forcing them to lose nearly all services or to pay money. With G Suite set up to allow users to access email, cloud storage, and other apps or applets on a custom domain. Of course, the tools in question are those that are now associated with Google Workspace. So the idea was to take these enterprise services and shift them further to the enterprise side of the equation. Since these are enterprise-grade apps and custom domains are associated with that market segment as well. Now, Google won’t be taking those services away from G Suite Legacy users. Or, at the very least, not from all users.
Who will still be impacted by the shift away from the free variant of G Suite Legacy and how?
With the change in place, businesses and enterprise or commercial users still aren’t off of the hook. For those users, the free edition “will no longer be available starting June 27.” Users in that sphere will need to upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription to keep their services intact. Users who access the G Suite Legacy free edition for “non-commercial purposes” can opt out of the transition, according to Google’s latest message. Meaning that they’ll still have access to their custom domain Gmail. As well as free access to “no-cost Google services.” Google expressly lists services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, as part of the deal. As well as any purchased content, services, or data. So users who aren’t accessing G Suite for business purposes will be able to keep all of that. In addition to keeping the non-business centric YouTube and Google Photos benefits that were already to be kept under the original plan.
