Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace

It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?

My email is disliked due to its brevity, turning the single clear and concise sentence of into a multi paragraph treatise might just lead to promotions, raises and bonuses which I can trickle down through the economy.

I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail

Proton has a nice feature for writing emails.

They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.

Maybe you aren't in a space where it would be useful, but not everyone who has to write an email is a great and concise writer.

I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.

I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...

Formal writing is just that.

Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me

Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah blah

Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her

Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah, $$$, blah blah

Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid

Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank account, blah

Alice: kthx

Letter: Blah blah blah...

Found it: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.

> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.

This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!

Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.

> people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.

It's more complicated than this.

The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.

Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.

I bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too—AI writes, AI evaluates, what could go wrong? :)

I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of laconicism.

The secret is to add every meeting into your Jira as a task, and then close it once the meeting is done.

Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.

When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.

When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.

"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'

Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)

Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.

Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.

If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.

Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?

I don't blame you for getting angry.

How big's the org? This setup feels unavoidable past a certain company size as growth attracts grifters who then call meetings atop meetings to appear useful.

Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?

That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.

I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i found it performed better when i broke down the task into individual steps.

I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?

That does sound generally useful. Out of interest: Do you ever see a one hour meeting being summed up so brief that the participants question why they spend an hour on the meeting (or more realistically, question if the LLM understood the meeting at all).

Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.

Google's implementation of AI really shows the innovators dilemma in action

These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m

I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.

4. Awkward situation ensues when you both meet at a location AI recommended to you both just after telling it to lie about your schedule.

You can skip the piles and piles of linguistic bullshit and wasted energy with a json API.

People always criticize Hallmark but it was never my understanding that the pre-written sentiment in those cards in any way obviated the need to write your own message. In fact, apart from generic Christmas cards you might get from insurers, and "thank you" cards from charities, I can't think of a time I've gotten such a card without a personal message written in it.

Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards, just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to someone?

This is such a perfect analogy and I never put it together before.

I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything. It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that the relationship is fake.

I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your interactions because you can't be bothered?

We're talking about it here. It seems like the multi trillion dollar company might actually be onto something.

"students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills."

So... not a biased assessment, or anything.

I've never had Prime and I get free shipping 100% of the time.

You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.

I was on Prime for years until it lapsed because of a card change, and I realized most of my shipping would still be free:

- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold

- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold

- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.

- Prime day sales aren't great

Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)

Loosing the people that actually care about the price/reward is a bonus for them, now they have an audience that buys superfluous stuff.

If your mail is extremely low volume, you might like Migadu's low cost plans. They charge by number of messages in/out rather than per domain or something. It's been handy for me for a few lightly used domains including resurrecting one that the previous owner had let expire and then suddenly needed.

I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.

I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.

I'm considering moving to Fastmail for email and calendar, Sync.com for cloud files. It would be annoying to have separate logins for each though. One nice thing about GWS was a single login for all the apps.

we use Claude

That of course allows for a new internal seditious attack vector. Generate a handful of spreadsheets in your own folder, name it something like "executive payroll data" or "sales revenue by org," put whatever you want in there, mark it visible by all, and wait.

Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."

It wouldn't need to be a permissions error on the file caused by the accountant, it could be an authorisation error on behalf of <whoever gives the LLM access to the various systems> providing too high a level of access (in their enthusiasm for the biggest possible set of training data).

This was just posed as a hypothetical, not something that actually happened. It would also require that the person asking about salary information already have access to said data.

Full quote: > "Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he explained.

Berkowitz said salary information, for example, might be picked up by a Copilot service.

"Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated," he told us. "But nobody has that. People have implemented these systems over time, particularly really big companies. And you get these conflicting authorizations or conflicting access to data."

Hacking in 2025

Ah it's new tech, they just need to get used to it until they can't do without!

My company is doing some similar crap. Half a year wasted on some bullshit AI thing that half the engineers were questioning from the start. Usage numbers are in the low 10%-20% range and are dropping despite massive push from marketing and onboarding teams.

The solution is to of course push even more AI stuff. The actual quote one of the C-level used was "Users don't understand the power of AI yet!" and I could barely hold in my laugh when I heard it.

I've been feeling like the world has lost their fucking minds with the AI push. I know that VC/investors play a big role in it, but I've never seen anything quite like it. The AI toothbrush [1] really took the cake for me for peak of absurdity, I wonder what these geniuses will come up with next...

[1] https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/genius-x

I do wonder if these kind of price cuts (see also Microsoft) will finally stop the demands from investors that everything be AI.

Collective punishment.

Bob need's that bonus.

yes this particular seat price increase might be the one that breaks the camel’s back

an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to go

Is it really though?

Pretty sure that's not how the maths worked out, but rather $2 is the amount that would cover the cost of running the service based on data of existing customer usage levels.

This is a strategic play, not a revenue play.

Google: Is that a trick question?

A little searching suggests you may have to contact support to get the toggles: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/318850451?hl=en&msgid...

I don't have a good way to verify that though.

I've been using it for setting up infra and projects on GCP and its been great. I use cursor for coding, but that isnt as helpful responding outside the IDE on cloud config. I have no GCP experience and I was able to get to a working application very quickly with Gemini. The GCP docs are outdated, often conflicting, but the Gemini experience was excellent.

Looking at https://one.google.com/about/plans it seems that the plans currently (in the US) are:

- "Standard 200 GB" ($30/year)

- "Premium 2 TB" ($100/year)

- "AI Premium 2 TB" (free first month + $20/month, so $220–$240/year)

- "Premium 5 TB" ($250/year)

and only the last two come with Gemini Advanced.

Possibly. But my Claude prompts work fine on ChatGPT, the only difference being ChatGPT isn't very good. I pay for both.

I would not pay for Gemini - which is presumably why they've added it for "free" for everyone.

My anthropic prompts in the API are structured. I've got one amazing API prompt that has 67 instructions, and gives mind-blowing results (to the point that it has replaced a human) but for a simple question I don't find value in that. And, frankly, 'consumer'-facing AI chatbots shouldn't need prompting expertise for basic out of the box stuff.

The prompt I used in this example was simply "Please extract the data points contained within this report and present as structured data"

> and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that

When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API? I use typingmind for quickly throwing things at my API keys for testing, and I'm pretty sure you can have a persistent custom system prompt, though I think you'd need to input it for each vendor/model.

if people are worrying about importing their digital lives into fastmail from google workspace: you don't need to worry

I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g. Google's)

but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly

for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed, I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new fastmail (using jmap)

and diffed before/after

result: zero differences

perfect

I don't quite get these switches:

> From G Suite to Fastmail

Mail is only a small part of G Suite.

That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.

Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease of use and convenience.

How did you handle the non-email transition part, respectively where to?

I made the same switch, and have also loved it. I also much prefer the interface to Gmail's. If you've got one account and want to configure a bunch of addresses to go to the same inbox, it's a no brainer. But if you're actually maintaining multiple users, it is not cheap.

Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.

I also switched to Fastmail for one of my domains. I am generally happy, just I wish they were better at nuking spam.

It’s wild that aside from gunk like AI and the occasional UI revamp and messaging app launch/kill cycle, the core Workspace features really haven’t changed or improved much since I started using it 15 years ago.