This process is automated – no actual people are sifting through emails and matching ads to them – but it does make some businesses concerned that sensitive commercial information is accessible by a third party.īusinesses on the free version of Gmail aren’t able to install third-party apps through the Google Apps Marketplace. In the free version of Gmail Google displays little text ads targeting any keywords it finds in your emails. Most businesses probably see this as peace of mind but it’s also less distracting from a productivity perspective. The free version of Gmail includes access to Google Docs (word processor), Google Sheets (spreadsheets) and Google Slides (presentations) but if you run into problems then you can’t just pick up the phone and give Google a call. This is a huge incentive, especially for businesses that have started to look beyond Gmail at other parts of the Google Apps suite. Businesses that deal in Microsoft Office documents rarely touch these limits on a per user basis but as we move to using video more often in work, those storage limits will become more relevant. The paid version has 30GB on the US$5 a month plan and unlimited storage for US$10 a month (or 1TB if your business has less than five users). The free version of Gmail comes with 15GB of space for your documents, emails, photos and other files. The guarantee is probably more valuable in theory than reality, as compensation for downtime is limited to the fees paid to Google which are tiny. While there is no similar guarantee for the free version of Gmail, it rarely has problems either. That means the service is designed to operate 24/7 without fail, and that unexpected outages will be less than nine hours a year. Google stands behind the paid version of its Gmail with a 99.9% guaranteed uptime. For US$5 a month you can have an email address It looks much more professional and is worth it for the branding value alone. The reason they don’t is because it looks cheap. There are seven main reasons which make paying for Gmail a very easy decision.īusinesses that use the free version of Gmail can only send emails as Notice how your bank, insurance company and airline never use consumer email addresses. Why should a business use the paid version of Gmail instead? Google sells an almost identical version of Gmail as part of its online productivity suite Google Apps, which costs US$5 per user a month. Within that number are at least several million businesses that use a generic Gmail address to contact customers. Google claims there are over 425 million users of its free web email service, Gmail.

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