Grandfathered-in “Legacy G Suite” users got a scare recently when another new “transition” message started popping up in the Google Admin console. “The transition to Google Workspace has started,” said the new message that suddenly appeared in people’s accounts. This was after Legacy G Suite users went through a contentious transition last year, where Google’s opening position involved shutting down their accounts if people didn’t start paying, but eventually, it was talked into not doing that. A Google spokesperson tells us the Workspace transition message was “a bug that surfaced an old banner from earlier in the process last year, and our team is working on removing it. More changes are not happening at this time, and those who previously opted-in for personal use are not expected to take any further action.”

We’ve received a few questions about this message, and this Reddit post has people wondering what the deal is, but it’s just a bug. That’s great because Legacy G Suite users have gone through enough already. To recap, Google currently offers businesses the option to pay a monthly fee for a Google/Gmail account that ends in a custom domain name instead of @gmail.com. Today this is called “Google Workspace,” but due to Google’s constant rebrands, it was first called “Google Apps for your Domain,” then “Google Apps,” and then “G Suite.” Google’s custom domain service was not always paywalled and not always exclusively aimed at businesses—it was free from 2006 to 2012. Google even pitched these accounts to families as a way to let everyone have similar email addresses. Some people did so, which means today they are getting a paid service for free.

Last year, the Google accounting department turned its Eye of Sauron on these long-term users and threatened to take away their nearly 16-year-old accounts if they didn’t start paying a business rate for these formerly free and not necessarily business accounts. After a public outcry, Google eventually left these “Legacy G Suite accounts” alone after making users confirm that they were using their accounts for “non-business” purposes. After that, everything was settled.

Legacy G Suite users are specifically not a part of “Workspace,” which is a paid service. So this new message that popped up yesterday suggests they would have moved to another new service. Even though Google says it’s an error that users could see this message, actually following the prompt would lead you to another error message about “Google Workspace for personal use” which is a product that does not exist. Workspace has tiers like “Business Starter,” and grandfathered-in users are on “Legacy G Suite”, but “Workspace for personal use” is not a thing. Apparently, this was all the beta branding for the original plan last year, and somehow it all got published yesterday.

Google Workspace for personal use would be a great product for Google to sell, by the way. We’ve complained before that while Apple and Microsoft both sell custom domain email services to consumers at a reasonable rate, Google does not, only offering business email at much more expensive rates. A big part of the Legacy G suite problem is that these personal users have nowhere to go inside Google.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1914453