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G Suite Price Increase – Is it time to re-evaluate your subscription?
Chelsea Sauder • April 13, 2019
If you’re a G Suite subscriber, you’ve likely already seen the 20% price hike come into effect. Earlier this year, Google announced a price increase for both their G Suite Basic and Business plans, effective April 2nd.
The justification for the increase was that there has been significant organic growth of available tools and capabilities within the platform over the past 10 years and that this adjustment is reasonable. For many organizations, this price increase should trigger a closer look at your subscription to ensure you’re getting the most value possible from your monthly investment. That said, there are more than a few articles online comparing the features, benefits, and functionality in G Suite and Office 365 – this isn’t another one of those. Today, we want to take a more practical approach to this discussion.
An initial assessment of your subscription should include whether your company works without Microsoft Products such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. In our experience, many companies started with G Suite because they didn’t need licenses for the Microsoft Office suite of products. Unfortunately, as they’ve grown, they’re now spending money on G Suite and separately purchasing Microsoft licenses. If you’re keeping tabs on your bills, you’ll realize this is more costly than aggregating your services under the Office 365 umbrella. Let’s look at a practical example – if you’re a subscriber to the G Suite Basic plan ($6/user per month) and you’re also adding Microsoft Office licenses such as Word ($8.25/user per month), then you’re spending $14.25/user per month. As an alternative, you could bring these together into a single bill in the Office 365 ecosystem for $12.50/user per month. This savings is even further exaggerated if you’re a subscriber to the G Suite Business plan, coming in at $12/user per month. In either of these scenarios, a modestly sized company may be overpaying by $500-$1000 per year.
Next, consider your growth trajectory, support needs, and desire for seamless interoperability with partner organizations. A year ago, as reported by Reuters, only 15 companies from the S&P 500 used G Suite for their operations.
While these represent some big names, the prevalence of support experts for Microsoft products is much higher, and their tools more developed, as a result of their long-term lead in this field. If you’re poised for growth, you might consider taking a page from the playbook of these very large companies and sticking to the Microsoft option. This extends into employee comfort and interoperability as well. When on-boarding resources to your growing company, it is much more likely that new staff will have experience utilizing familiar Microsoft products. The same can be said for third parties that you work with; asking someone to join a Skype meeting tends to have a different feeling than asking someone to join a Hangout.
Finally, we should look at the other pieces of the Office 365 landscape that your organization might embrace if given the opportunity. Office 365 setup and adoption follows a few typical patterns and generally includes the need for corporate email (Exchange), corporate instant messaging and audio conferencing (Skype), and data storage (OneDrive for Business). While these three very common components are significant enablers for many small and midsize businesses, there remains substantial untapped value in the platform and licenses that you’re already paying for if that’s all you’re using!
A few of the key features we often see missed are:
- Internal Company Portal
- Intuitive Document Management System
- Business Process Automation
- Task and Project Management Capabilities
- Robust Reporting and Data Visualization
Is your company using G Suite and ready to move to Office 365? Our team is here to help you migrate your email, calendar, contacts, and documents without any data loss and with minimal interruption to your operations. Contact us here
and let’s talk!
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