Comment by AshleyGrant
19 hours ago
Yep. I have to maintain a separate consumer gmail/google account for this exact reason. I end up paying for some things twice, such as Google Photos since I want those photos synced to my "enterprise" account. I've had this thing, like you, since it was free and somehow I'm now paying nearly $30/month for two people to have Email and storage for that email.
Meanwhile, Microsoft allows enterprise accounts to purchase products for only a subset of their accounts instead of big-bang upgrading the "entire org".
With Microsoft, an org can mix and match E3, E5, or E7 licensing tiers on a per-user basis. Which makes sense, because not every employee is "the same"! This is just obvious if you stop and think about for more than a fraction of a second. As a random example, I work with an org in "transport". Their backoffice staff have a bunch of advanced cloud app licenses, their bus drivers do not, because their job isn't sitting in front of a PC all day!
Google. Just. Doesn't. Get. This.
It's all-or-nothing.
Upgrade the entire org, or nobody gets AI.
You absolutely can mix Google Workspace licences but you either need to go via the Google sales team or via an Google services partner.
And to be honest, I understand the reasoning, Google Workspace is supposed to be simpler to operate in comparison to Microsoft 365, and simple means a single licencing choice.
If you're at the scale where you need to worry about mixing and matching licences, you're at the scale where you should be looking at either an enterprise contract or going through a partner, otherwise you're going to be paying list price.
It sucks for people who can handle the complexity, but also as someone who has spent far too time in Microsoft licencing conversations and contract talks, Microsoft licencing is painfully complex (some licencing is across the whole tenant, some spend is consumption based billing against Azure, some licencing is requires a minimum amount against a %age of your total M365 user base, and then don't get me started on licencing machine users or multiplexing).