Google announces first ever price hikes for G Suite

Chris Merriman
@ChrisTheDJ
17 January 2019

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GOOGLE HAS ANNOUNCED that it's hiking pricing for its G Suite array of productivity apps.

It represents the first price rise since the offering was first announced, under a variety of different brands, a decade ago.

The price rises aren't small - 20 per cent in some cases, but this only applies to the Basic and Business editions. Enterprise customers will be subject to more bespoke arrangements, it was ever thus.

Monthly prices will go up from $5 to $6 per seat on the basic plan and from $10 to $12 per seat on the business tier. Google says that there will be "equivalent" rises in local currencies which will mean that UK users can expect prices to rise from the current £6.60 to around £7.50 for business users, and £3 to £4 for basics.

The company points out that despite adding much more to G Suite compared to the early days, the price has remained a constant.

G Suite comes under the auspices of Google Cloud, which recently announced it was taking over $1bn in revenue per quarter for the first time, but it's not clear how much of that is coming from G Suite.

The price rises come into play on 2 April, and as a sweetener, Google has confirmed that it will honour the lower prices for any contracts in progress at that time (so it might be worth a bit of prepaying) and for anyone that renews in good time.

Google faces a lot of competition in the space. There's Office 365 of course, but also the likes of Dropbox and Box which offer complete platforms for users to work from. It's widely thought that, although there's no official information, G Suite is lagging behind many others.

Google has the advantage of offering the basics - Docs, Sheets and Google One cloud storage, with free entry-level tiers, which has allowed more potential customers to get familiar with it.

The price rise is in contrast to the company's cloud compute offerings which have been repeatedly dropped in price, thanks to the cost savings offered by its expansion, in accordance with Moore's Law. μ