Google Apps Cost

Google Apps can entirely replace your organization’s need for expensive in-house servers and clunky, outdated email and collaboration systems. Google offers a full suite of tools for businesses, educational institutions, government, and nonprofit organizations.

Determining Your Google Apps Cost

What type of organization are you?

• Google Apps for Business is priced on a monthly, contract-free Flexible Plan and a more economical Annual Plan. These are $5 per user account per month and $50 per user account per year, respectively.
• Google Apps for Government is priced the same, but set up to meet the particular security requirements (i.e. FISMA) of government agencies.
• Google Apps for Education grants educational institutions the standard set of apps completely free of charge.
• Google Apps for Nonprofit offers nonprofit organizations with under 3,000 users Google Apps for Education for free. If your nonprofit has over 3,000 users, you are eligible for Google Apps for Business at a discounted rate of $30 per user per year.

Each of these options features an unlimited user maximum, and each user will have immediate access to Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Cloud Connect, Groups, Sites, Video, and more.

What apps will you need to add?

Of course, features can be added to your domain through the Google Apps Marketplace as well, at varying prices per user. You can choose which users to purchase apps for, so you only pay for what you need.

Do you need Google Message Security, Google Message Discovery, and Archiving?

Google also offers archiving and e-discovery services, which are powered by Postini. Postini guarantees compliance in cases of litigation, and allows administrators to search a centralized email archive from which they can identify and export email messages for further analysis and review. These services are priced based on retention length and the need for encryption. Google Message Security is actually included in the base price of Google Apps for Business. The annual cost for Google Message Discovery for Apps is $13 per user with one year retention, and $33 for ten year retention. Google Message Encryption for Apps is $35 per user per year.

What hardware can you power down and what software can you stop licensing?

Once you move to Google Apps, you can shut down your old email servers and stop paying for Microsoft or IBM software. Blackberry servers and off-site data backup can be powered off. Don’t forget to subtract these numbers from the total cost.

Your labor and infrastructure costs

Another benefit of Google Apps is signifcantly reduced IT hassles, both for administrators and end-users. In many cases IT costs alone shrink to as little a tenth of what they were previously. These reductions in cost depend on many factors, such as your users’ proficiency and the size of your technical staff.

Configuration labor costs and services

There is an up-front cost of migrating data to Google’s cloud. This number depends on your current software architecture, and the services you’ll need, such as change management and custom-app cloud development that can be provided by an Authorized Google Apps Reseller like Cloud Sherpas.