Earlier this week Google announced on it's Enterprise Blog that Google Apps for Business is no longer being offered as a free service. Here at Edgeworks Creative we had moved our customers over to the Google platform for email, calendar and other office applications as they were both best-of-breed and free. The new rules now require a $50 per user per year fee.

For current clients there is no change to your service - your use of GMail for your domain email is still enabled and still without cost.

For new clients, however, we now offer a couple different options for managing email for your domains.

We can provide integration with Google Apps for Business which features GMail for handling email at the price of $50 per user per year. Our websites typically include functionality that sends email from your domain (such as contact forms or email alerts) and we use an unmonitored email account ([email protected]) to do this. If you decide to use Google Apps for email then we will need to make use of a user account on your behalf to do this. This means that new sites using GMail will be required to have two accounts at minimum. We do not want to tie the web applications to individual user accounts ([email protected]) since the user credentials (password) are required and that information should be private and unknown to anyone including us.

The second option we are proud to offer is with another very well respected email (and other online apps!) provider: ZoHo 

Integration with Zoho comes in several different levels of service depending on the number of email accounts your business requires. For a complete round-up of the packages offered please see this page. Keep in mind that with all of the plans one email address ([email protected]) needs to be set aside for use by your website. 

Edgeworks Creative has prided itself on extremely reasonable hosting fees for its clients and we intend to keep things that way. We truly regret that Google has seen fit to pull the plug on free integration with Google Apps for Business, but we believe that we have found a very good replacement to handle the needs of most businesses. In fact, for many smaller businesses a single email address is plenty and we are able to keep email hosting free. For those businesses requiring more we regret the need to begin charging for email hosting, but we believe we have found an excellent solution for an extremely competitive price. 

With ZoHo as our email hosting partner we can either handle the email hosting charges on our end and include them with your annual hosting fee or you can set up your account with ZoHo and manage payment directly. 

If you have any questions or concerns please do leave us a comment or get in touch.