Google is a company which is mostly renowned for its moto “Don’t be evil” but in past few years Google has become very serious about generating money and blocking out all loopholes which tech nerds used to use for getting stuffs for free. If you have an old Google Apps a.k.a G Suite legacy account you might have free user limit starting from 10 to 2,000. I’ve seen many Google Apps a.k.a G Suite legacy account that has around 200 free user limit but the owner of that account can barely use it for his current business.
The reason behind this is that having a Google Apps legacy account with 200 or more free users means it is a really old Google Apps free account which Google later renamed as Google Apps legacy account and removed many cool features from those legacy accounts, like Migration, adding Secondary Domain etc. to encourage users to opt for their paid plan i.e. $5/user/month.
How To Change Primary Domain for Google Apps Legacy Account
Now Google officially stopped allowing the secondary domain addition for Google Apps legacy accounts back in 2012 and legacy users are only been allowed to add domain alias instead of a complete secondary domain name. But till 28th August 2015 I was able to add secondary domain to Google Apps legacy accounts by doing a simple and popular upgradation trick as follows:
- Click on upgrade to trial of Google Apps for Business
- Go to Domains section, add & verify your domain name
- Downgrade back to your legacy free account before you run out of your trial period
But now, IT’S NO MORE POSSIBLE. That’s right. I’ve tried to do the same thing a few weeks back in September and now you cannot downgrade back to your legacy account unless you remove your secondary domain name that you have added after the upgradation.
I know that the only reason people was able to perform the trick for all this time is because there was a minor loophole/bug which was present in Google Apps down-gradation service and never actually gets fixed by Google. But now it seems Google has fixed the loophole and those legacy free Google Apps account are completely out of work if you still don’t use the primary domain.
What about Domain Alias? What’s the difference?
Domain alias is nothing but a new name to the same email address. This is really important if you have same domain name with various TLDs. Let’s say you have a multinational company and you use Google Apps for your business needs. Now though www.example.com might be your primary company domain but for different countries you may also have the following domain names:
- example.uk
- example.in
- example.pk
- example.nl and so on…..
Now obviously you do not want to create separate email id for same person with different domain TLDs, right? Because it will be impossible for that person to manage all those email account. This is where Domain Alias kicks in. If you have an employee email as jhon@example.com and if you add all your different country domains as Domain Alias, even if someone email to jhon@example.in it will be delivered to jhon@example.com automatically but the address will still show the .in domain name. Cool right? I know, this is the actual implementation of domain alias. So, in short domain alias won’t give you a new email address.
So, what’s the way then?
Well, Google has covered all of its loopholes (thanks to the internet for sharing them publicly) and made sure that you cannot access your Google Apps legacy account lifelong by keep adding new secondary domain, unless you have access to Google Apps for Education or Google Apps for Non-Profit or Google Apps for Government. For these three Google Apps category the general legacy rule doesn’t apply. That’s right.
So, I guess now you have only 2 ways either you get and of those above three mentioned accounts (which is really hard to get, really hard) or you pay $5/user/month to Google if you are happy with 25GB Google Storage and if you want unlimited, well pay $10/user/month. That’s the end of the story.
There is no way you can add new secondary domain to Google Apps legacy account anymore. The most shocking thing is Google has release this patch so quietly that almost no one have noticed this change unless they tried to do it on their account. Google just added a new link to their “Downgrade to legacy Free edition” help article. See the screenshot below for more.
