Comment by thenaturalist
3 days ago
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.