Comment by bcoates
3 days ago
Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
You'll have to rip that band-aid off eventually, may as well get it over with. It's only going to get worse.
I switched from G Suite to Fastmail for my custom domain and I've been very happy with it.
if people are worrying about importing their digital lives into fastmail from google workspace: you don't need to worry
I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g. Google's)
but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly
for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed, I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new fastmail (using jmap)
and diffed before/after
result: zero differences
perfect
When I joined fastmail I imported my gmail and also configured it to be able to fully use my gmail account via IMAP so I wouldn't need to sign into gmail at all.
I was also moving from a gmail address, so next I created a label that got attached to any email received to the old email address via that IMAP connection, which gave me a nice self-maintaining todo list for services that had not yet been updated to use a new email address.
I was also surprised by how flawlessly seamless the whole process was. It was a big factor in my selection of Fastmail over other competitors when I was making the decision to leave Gmail.
I don't quite get these switches:
> From G Suite to Fastmail
Mail is only a small part of G Suite.
That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.
Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease of use and convenience.
How did you handle the non-email transition part, respectively where to?
From the GP:
> Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
The only reason they have the "full" G Suite, is because there is no "just custom domain Gmail" offer available.
It's a pet peeve of mine when the only offering of some companies is just a single "full on premium" offer, and not some simple need. YouTube is an example of this for me, they have only an "everything included" subscription in YouTube Premium, but no other less expensive option, like "just no adverts please, I'm already happy with my alternative music and movie streaming subscriptions".
I only occasionally view YouTube vids (I tend to prefer text-based content). The adverts made me uninstall the YouTube app from my iPhone and similarly I will never watch YouTube on my AppleTV as it's just too unpleasant with the adverts and (as I said above) there is no reasonably priced offering when all I care is to have the adverts turned off.
When you sign up for a Google account, there's a label called "use your existing email", which will give you everything Google usually offers minus Gmail.
Without Gmail, I have yet to stumble upon a single use case which would require me to pay a subscription. I can use Docs, join Meets, use my phone, have a YouTube channel, click on "sign in with Google" buttons... no subscription to Google necessary. I notice no differences between my completely-free personal account and a Workspace work account.
I pay $5 a month to Fastmail to have a custom domain in my email, best of both worlds for a third of the price!
I simply don't use other Google features or in limited capacity. I have Office 365 desktop installation. I set up a NAS as a Drive replacement (that was a bit costly, but no regrets and it actually works across all my computers where Drive would randomly crash, files would disappear etc.) with automatic backups to cloud and every now and then I archive data to external hard drives.
I made the same switch, and have also loved it. I also much prefer the interface to Gmail's. If you've got one account and want to configure a bunch of addresses to go to the same inbox, it's a no brainer. But if you're actually maintaining multiple users, it is not cheap.
Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.
I also switched to Fastmail for one of my domains. I am generally happy, just I wish they were better at nuking spam.
This spurred me to go back and read the predictions:
>But I can tell you this: Google has changed my life. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google in 3 tries, looking no further than the first 10 search results on each try, then it probably doesn't exist.
What a sad future we're in.
Plus now I'm noticing it doesn't work for more and more things. Youtube TV family sharing doesn't work, Android Auto had some problems, the news feed on my Pixel.