Google is closing down its free Apps. Wait, not for its (loyal) old customers!

One of the hot topics of Technology world today was about Google Apps. Google is shutting down its free Apps offering for small businesses. I am using Google Apps but I didn’t know if it was small business account or something else that I was using. Looking into the Google Apps website, you won’t no longer see any free option from today either. So I was looking on any piece of page I can find on internet to find out what will happen to my Google Apps service. I finally found this post on google enterprise blog saying the Free Apps won’t be affected. However, the link was not working at the time of posting. Later that day I got an email from Google saying:

Starting today, we’re no longer accepting new sign-ups for the free version of Google Apps (the version you’re currently using). Because you’re already a customer, this change has no impact on your service, and you can continue to use Google Apps for free.

Reading this comforted me. I never expected Google to make a free service to become fee based and force its users to pay. It is really nice of them to let those free Apps users keep their account. Otherwise I was looking for at least 50$ a year, or most probably getting my own hosting (for double that price of course) but with many additional options.

This reminds me of the time Google bought Feedburner and somehow messed up some feedburner feeds’ names. Apologizing its customers, it sent them a nice package of mouse and pen. The package was not that important but the move; showing how much they appreciate their customers.