More storage for some free Google Apps users only?

September 9, 2014 10:11 PM

We use the free Google Apps at our non-profit for about 5 heavy users who have hit storage limits, 30 light and another 30+ who need to access our Google Drive and other domain-limited sites. Previously we switched heavy users to a new account with access to the previous account, plus forwards as a work-around. Google's helpdesk says upgrade only as we're non-US. Does anyone have a better solution? We use Google spreadsheets and several marketplace apps, and otherwise are super-happy with Google but $4000/annually is a big upgrade bill!
posted by viggorlijah to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

First off, I'm not aware of any half-way point between the regular Google Apps for non-profits program and the Google Apps unlimited offering. If you want Google Apps with more storage, that appears to be your only option. It'd be nice if they let you upgrade only some users based on usage, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Ultimately, you're running into exactly the problem Google is hoping you'll have by using their free offering: now that you're hooked and switching costs are high, they're hoping you'll fork over the $120 per user per year. That's how they make money.

What are you storing that takes up 30 GB? Would it be possible to archive some of it to free up space amongst your heavy users? How much direct control over their accounts do you need? If it needs to be on cloud-based storage, I'd suggest moving some of the heavy-users' stuff over to another service like Office365, Dropbox or Box.com, which have business plans that are priced per-user. You give up the convenience of a single ecosystem, but it will be miles cheaper.

If not all of your files need to be cloud-based, then perhaps it'd make sense to make copies of the less-used files to couple of external hard drives or a small NAS, and then make sure that's backed up off-site using something like Carbonite or Crashplan.
posted by Aleyn at 10:41 PM on September 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

The General Audit Tool for Google Apps might help you zero in on usage: https://generalaudittool.com/products/ - I've tinkered with it and found it useful. Free for non-profits.
posted by idb at 10:39 AM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Can you be a little more specific about your Google Apps setup, as well as your heavy users usage patterns?

You mention that you're non-US, but that you're on the "free" Google Apps... is this the free edition of Apps for Education that Google offers to schools, non-profits and governments, or the legacy 10-user free Apps domain account that Google doesn't offer anymore? Or does Google offer a free basic "Apps for Work" domain account in your location?

I'm also confused about Aleyn's comment about not being able to upgrade some users' storage, since in (in the US at least) Apps for Business admins can purchase and allocate extra storage on a per-user basis, and Apps for Education users can purchase extra storage individually.

Also, are your heavy users using the Drive Sync app on the desktop to use their Drive space as cloud backup, or are their files being collaboratively shared among domain users?
posted by drumcorpse at 2:40 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I found a new work around! So I'm marking this resolved because it sort of works, and someone else might find it useful. We're in Singapore and Cambodia, signed up with Google Apps about 6-7 years ago, when it was first rolled out and we've never hit a limit on adding new users. However, some of the features that the free Google Apps shows in the US-guides don't appear in my version. I had been trying to add storage logged in as the account manager, but when I was logged in to my work email this morning, on a whim I tried adding storage directly and could - $1.99/m for 100GB across Gmail and GDrive. I had to log in to the other heavy user's email account and sign up for storage individually and now she has my personal credit card info in the Google Wallet associated with her work email, which is a personal security risk as she could in theory go on a mad shopping spree, but I'm personally trusting her. So this won't work for staff who I don't trust with my credit card unless I can get a stored value thing for Google Wallet, but it's good enough for now and beats a $4000 upgrade bill.

The Google helpdesk said this was not at all possible, so yay for weird loopholes!
posted by viggorlijah at 7:10 PM on September 10, 2014

It sounds like you have the old Google Apps "Standard Edition" rather than Apps for Nonprofits. I'd recommend that you consider switching to Apps for Nonprofits, which (I think) supports both admin-managed storage and user-managed storage. What you purchased is user-managed storage. But you might not even need that with the larger per-person quota you'd get under Apps for Nonprofits.

And, honestly, there's nothing keeping Google from pulling the rug out from under you if you're using a Standard Edition account. They haven't done that yet, but I suspect it could happen at some point.

You'll probably want to keep your current account as-is, and use a different domain for your Apps for Nonprofits account. Once you get that, you can migrate existing content to the new account, then decommission the old one, and finally create a domain alias in the new account that matches the old domain name. (Let me know if that doesn't make sense to you.)
posted by me & my monkey at 8:21 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]