Every organisation seeks to reduce costs in the most realistic way possible to increase profitability. Labour related costs are one of the biggest costs of many organisations. Google Workspace (G Suite ) licenses are one of those labour related costs that are paid per head and as such the annual renewal fees can be quite a hit on the pocket. Recently we assisted a new client to reduce their Google Workspace cost by over $10,000. Here is a combination of five ways you can also reduce your annual Google Workspace fees.
1 Get your Google Workspace at a lower price by moving to a Google partner
If you are paying for your Google Workspace licenses directly to Google, you cannot sign up for the annual payment. So you are paying $6 per month for the Basic package or $12 per month for the Business package or $25 for the enterprise package. As such for the year, you are paying $72 or $144 or $300 respectively based on your package. However, when you order Google Workspace from a Google Partner like us (HWS Technologies (formally Hapaweb Solutions)), you will be able to sign up for an annual package which comes with a discount. At Hapaweb you will pay a minimum of $64.80, $129.60 or $270 for the various packages. If – as an example, you have 1000 licenses on the Basic package, you will be saving $7.2 per license – this translates to $7200 or GHS 41,000+ a year. At Hapaweb you can even get lower prices than those stated in this article based on the number of licenses you currently have.
2 Delete and migrate old accounts
At Hapaweb, we have clients who were holding on to email accounts of old employees. They were reluctant to delete these accounts for fear they that may need some information from these accounts later. A simple solution to this is to create one single account called something like “oldemployees@yourdomain.com” and migrate all content in the accounts of old employees to this account. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to migrate users emails, contacts and Drive files for departed employees. Then create a mapping rule for all new emails to be diverted into the “oldemployees@yourdomain.com” mailbox.
3 Make use of domain alias
You can have up to 600 different domains on your Google Workspace admin console. These can be added as either add-on domains or as domain aliases. We had a client who had a domain name “ourcompanynameghana.com” and changed to a shorter domain name “newname.com”. In order not to lose emails coming through the old domain, they added the new domain name to their Google Workspace admin console and recreated all their users with the new domain name – so each user had TWO ACCOUNTS and two emails addresses. This setup in effect doubled the number of licenses and cost! A better solution was to add the new domain as a domain alias and automatically send and receive emails using both the old domain (primary domain) and the new domain (domain alias). Each employee will still have two email addresses but ONE ACCOUNT and this will be at no additional cost.
4 Make use of user aliases
While domain alias (see above) creates multiple email addresses for ALL email addresses on your Google Workspace admin console, user alias affects only users you select. One of our clients had a construction company with the domain “constructioncompany.com” and a food company with the domain “foodcompany.com”. Obviously employees are the construction company had email addresses ending with “constructioncompany.com”, while those at the food processing company had theirs ending with “foodcompany.com”.
However, there were some people like the owner, some board members, IT staff etc who had an email address for both companies as they worked for both companies. Instead of creating two ACCOUNTS for such employees, a better and no-cost option is to use user alias . User Alias allows Google Workspace admins to give a user an alternate address for receiving mail, in addition to the user’s primary address without the need of an additional ACCOUNT or Google Workspace license. So in effect, you can create info@domain.com and give it aliases such as contact@domain.com, support@domain.com, compains@domain.com etc without the need to create separate accounts for each and incur an additional cost.
5 Use Google Groups
Most companies have generic email addresses such as contact@domain.com, itsupport@domain.com, sales@domain.com etc. Some of our clients create these as separate email accounts and in effect pay for the licenses associated with each of them. Then they give a couple of people in the organisation the login details to access these mailboxes or do an auto-forwarding from within the mailbox or using mapping rule to deliver the emails to people who should act on the emails. A much better option is to make use of Google Groups. Each Google group is assigned an email address which does not require a license – so in effect, you can use Groups to create free email addresses. For instance, you can create a Sales Group and assign it the sales@domain.com email address and then add all the users who should access these emails to the group. So when emails are sent to sales@domain.com, they are automatically forwarded to the selected users.
There you have it – 5 ways to reduce your Google Workspace annual renewal fees. If you are in Ghana and is in need of Google Workspace or currently using Google Workspace , then we encourage you to contact us and we will provide you with free consumption on either signing up for Google Workspace or using more effectively
