I want to migrate our office staff to Google Drive. There are only 6 of us and we have virtually no data that we need to share. All our purchasing, invoicing etc is on another CRM and we have only a few hundred MB of data sheets etc that I'd like all the staff to have access to via the cloud.

We have one person with 20+ GB in his emailbox, this has been piling up for 15 years. He needs to keep it all but it is over the G Drive limit of 15GB free.

My question is: Can I set up a domain name through google and pay for only one GDrive for business (the guy with the 20GB of data) and have the rest of us just use the free google service and have all of us migrate over to the new google domain?

We currently have an exchange server in our office that we will get rid of so we will have to migrate all our emails to google drive. I'm just concerned that I have to pay for google for business for all 6 of our staff just because one guy has over the 15GB free limit. Is this true?

Is there a specific reason you want to use Google Drive, rather than other 'cloud' services like Dropbox for distribution to your workgroup?


I'm a bit confused by your wanting to move emails to Google Drive, as Drive itself isn't an email storage service.

Google APPS is a collection of Google Services, including

Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, Google+, Drive, Docs (Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides), Sites, Admin and Vault

If you want to ditch your current system and move everyone under Google Apps using a Domain Name then, yes, you will have to sign up and pay for Google Apps for Business.

Google Apps for Work | Choose a Plan

Other than the 15-year user, any other issues with your current system?

Set the guy with 20GB of data up on a separate google drive account which isn't shared otherwise you're right - everyone will need to pay for the additional data even though they're not using it.

If it's just his email then he doesn't need to share it. 100 GB for one person costs about $5 a month from memory.

My question is: Can I set up a domain name through google and pay for only one GDrive for business (the guy with the 20GB of data) and have the rest of us just use the free google service and have all of us migrate over to the new google domain?

No. You can't.

Free users can't migrate over to the new domain because they're free users. gApps domains only support paid users.

It's $5/user/month, and there's an annual discount.

I was under the (I guess mistaken) impression that we could use the [email protected] address via the google cloud email server. Then I would have everybody in my office also do this to access their company email AND I could do this free. My concern and I think it's been addresses is that 1. I can't use mycompanyname.com without paying for the google for business fee and 2. All employees have to pay for the google for business even if they don't have any requirement for data storage.

If I have to pay for all mydomainname.com users, do I also have to pay for [email protected] and info@mycomp.. and sales@mycomp....? I see on the link provided above that the fee is only $5/mo/user so it's not expensive and that provides 30GB so the guy's email content should fit within that.

The real requirement is to get rid of the emailserver sitting in our office to a cloud based solution. We have max 6 people, we don't need this piece of hardware (emailserver) slowing down our system.

I looked at Microsoft 365 and it's only 170baht per person per month and I don't have to pay for info and support and [email protected], which maybe I do for gdrive.

I'm not certain if 365 provides more value than gdrive.

It's wanting the mydomainname.com that tips it to a pay service.

Google Apps used to have a free version, but stopped offering it a while back.

Gapps allows email account to create name aliases that get forwarded to that account, or you can create a 'group' email name that forwards to 'many' members of a list you create and manage, all free.

The fee in on the individual account, not the name, aliases or forward lists.