Wonderful. What was free yesterday costs $3000 per year today. Google Apps might be a cost savings for enterprises, but for non-profits, small businesses, or individuals, it's a ripoff.

Heck, go back further (when the older limit was in the hundreds of accounts - this is at least the third decrease since Google Apps introduction) and the gap was even larger. This is really just a continuation of a long trend. Hopefully this is as low as they'll ever go.

Whether it's a rip-off sort of depends on the other options available and what they cost versus the features they provide. While the non-free Google Apps definitely isn't the cheapest around, from what I can see they're still competitive, though definitely not the cheapest.

-- David

When you're a non-profit, and the choice is between "have the unpaid IT department do e-mail in-house on the existing linode for $0", or "pay Google several percent of our budget to do e-mail for us", which option do you think seems more reasonable?

E-mail is important to our operations, but it's not important enough to spend 1-2% of our annual budget when money is already extremely tight for non-profits such as ours.

Guess it would depend on whether I was the unpaid IT department or not :-) I'm still not quite sure it's fair to call GA a rip-off, since in-house (unpaid or not) still ends up costing, even if only in IT time.

Hmm, actually, if I were the unpaid IT department, I might even consider spending my time on setting up multiple GA accounts with a primary domain account using groups to forward to the sub-domain accounts, which were configured to be able to send mail as if from the primary domain.

-- David

If your organization is under 3,000 users, you can apply for the free Google Apps for Education through the Google for Nonprofits site.

http://www.google.com/nonprofits/

note: a little further reading and I found that for this, they mean 501(c)3, so if your non-profit is under a different section like a (c)7 club or a (c)8 fraternity, no luck. Since they specifically say 501(c)3, they're writing it off as a donation.

There are two problems with that:

1) 501(c)3 is for charities only, which rules out most non-profits. We're not a charity, we're a non-profit. All charities are non-profit, but not all non-profits are charities. Most aren't, I'd imagine.
2) 501(c)3 status is only granted to US companies. So that's also a problem for us, not being in the US and all.

yeah, they're being misleading with that calling it "for nonprofits" when they mean "for charities".

Hopefully you were signed up before the change, the email I got said I was grandfathered.

Actually, we never signed up, because 50 accounts wasn't enough either, and even if we managed to squeeze into 50 accounts, there'd be no possibility of future growth.