Quote:
Originally Posted by wakaba
Actually, google used to provide free google apps features such as custom domains, but withdrew some of these features from legacy users and started charging for them.
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At risk of stirring the pot here, to be fair, Google never actually withdrew its free custom domain offering from users who already had them prior to the service being officially discontinued (in Dec 2012).
I have an domain from my old business parked on the old legacy Google Apps for Domains Standard Edition that still works exactly as it did back when the service was available — a number of my friends and former business partners still use those addresses, so it seemed the best place to park the domain at no cost when I shut down the business and finally decommissioned the in-house servers years ago.
In fact, Google even continued to grandfather in the same maximum number of users based on when you first signed up for the old free Google Apps Standard Edition — I still have 50 user slots available for my old domain, even though it was later lowered to a maximum of 10 (and I know somebody else who still has 200, from when they signed up at the very beginning). So I can not only maintain those existing accounts that were there in the beginning, but I can actually create as many new ones as I have room for.
That said, the difference between Google and FastMail is still a valid point here.... Google is a huge multi-billion dollar company that clearly has no problem allocating resources to maintain these old legacy free Google Apps domains. FastMail obviously has more limited resources than Google does.