Editor’s note (2026): Google rebranded G Suite to Google Workspace in October 2020. If you’re still on a free legacy Google Apps, G Suite, or Google for Business account, the advice in this video is more relevant than ever — Google has been discontinuing legacy free accounts and migrating users to paid Google Workspace plans. Read on to learn why upgrading is essential for your business.
In the past, we had Google Enterprise and Google for Business, which became G Suite and is now called Google Workspace. Is there a need to upgrade to the current paid version? Find out in this video why there’s a need for you to ditch your legacy accounts right away!
In this video, Pete discusses the reasons why there is a need for you to ditch your free accounts from earlier editions of G Suite (now Google Workspace).
You may be using a free Google Enterprise or Google for Business account, but are your business information secured enough? Switching to a paid service might be the best business decision you make now. Nothing is more important than saving your data and getting the best of new Google Workspace features.
If you’re a business owner and you’ve used Google for a while, you may have access to a Google free account. What that means is a business account, which is now called Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), but you’re not paying for it.
What is Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)?
These are very old accounts. They used to be called Google for Enterprise, Google for your domain, Google for business, Google Apps for work. Eventually, it became G Suite, and in 2020 Google rebranded it to Google Workspace. But if you’re on an old account, you may have been given five users for free or maybe even 50. And these may feel like a free ride. For those business owners that have access to these, you might be thinking, “You know what? I’m one of the lucky ones and I can use Google Workspace for as much as I like”. But you’re missing out not only on a lot of features. But there are also some very real dangers with operating on one of these accounts.
Access to support with Google Workspace
Reason number one is that getting access to support just doesn’t exist on a free account. If right now you have a free account with Google, you do not get access to their support. And you can’t go through a reseller to get access to support either. Why? Because we have no way of having a billing relationship with your Google account. And the risk of that is if something goes wrong inside your Google account, well, you might not be able to get access to whatever’s gone wrong. You might not be able to get support for that. And so, the kind of things that can go wrong in a Google account is a Google file getting corrupted, maybe something that’s sitting in your Google drive disappearing or emails disappearing from your Gmail. That happens as well.
Risk of staying on the free Google account
The risk of staying on the Google account is if you’re on a free account right now and you don’t have access to that support, if something goes wrong, you can’t just upgrade to a paid account and then, “Hey presto, give me support.” It doesn’t work like that. Once you have an issue with your account, if you convert to a paid account, some of those are actually on different infrastructure to the old Google accounts inside Google’s data centres. And so, sometimes upgrading an account still won’t allow support to fix the problem if you’ve got something that’s gone wrong with the free account.
So the bottom line is if you’re on a free account, that’s awesome. Good for you. You’ve got a free ride. But I absolutely cannot recommend that you stick around on that free account. And if you are trusting this Google account for your business data, you’re absolutely crazy to think that it’s going to be safe if you don’t have a backup plan for support.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
