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Selling Google Apps Email
I've seen many threads asking for domains with grandfathered Google Apps on them. I just wondered what people do with 100-200 user accounts? Do you sell email to clients or give them away to friends and family? What would be the legality of me buying a domain then offering people personalised email with their own domain for say $5 a month?
Comments
Google apps is $5/mo per user or $50/yr..
I was thinking more of buying a 100 user account domain for say $30 then offering people 10 email addresses under their own personalised domain for $20 a year. They save $480 and I make my money back after selling to a couple of users.
It's illegal unless you're authorized reseller.
http://www.google.si/enterprise/apps/business/landing/partners/resellers/
If it was me I would much rather buy the domain with google apps for $30 then pay $20/yr for 10 accounts..
As @Spirit says, it's against the terms of service.
Don't be shocked when Google pulls the plug -- which they're gonna do eventually for all free google apps.
Other than email, what part of the Google apps offerings are desirable and critical? I have a grandfathered account used for a small business (20 employees) and it was really revolutionary when they introduced it; everyone was either hosting their own on linux and using squirrel mail as the front end or using some Windows Enterprise solution that was really expensive.
Hosting your own email servers, at least when google introduced google apps, really sucked. Spamassasin was a PIA to set up and so was getting all the components of the email solution working together (postfix, sendmail, etc). Not to mention hosting was expensive - the whole VPS market was immature at the time and the offerings were mostly unstable and not cheap.
Not to mention backing all this up...
I guess what I am trying to say is who really cares about all the other google apps - email is the only thing that really matters and it's shame they won't remove all the google app bloat and just offer the email portion. $5 per user per month is an unnecessary expense for a small business when margins are thin... Most businesses would just use their personal gmail addresses instead of paying the extra money.
Why? They make money off it just like they do with gmail. Think ads...
drive and docs are useful sometimes when you want to share files.
Thanks for your responses. I thought it was probably against the terms of service.
It's a shame really - even though it's just Gmail wrapped up in my own domain, I'm very happy with the service I get from Google apps personally. I just wanted to share the service and maybe make a few quid out of it!
Google likes data. And gapps free gives them a lot of it. All the ads they show are making money for them.
It is just gmail at your domain. But i agree the current price is expensive for small setups.