Google says the free ride is over for early users of the company's custom domain G Suite service. Google has long offered a service that lets you use Google apps on a custom domain, allowing you to have a Google email address that ends in your domain instead of "gmail.com." For the first six years of the service's life, the basic tier allowed you to create a custom domain account for free.

Now, you have to pay for the privilege of using a custom domain with a Google account.

As 9to5Google was the first to report, Google will shut down free G Suite accounts if the account holder doesn't transition to a paid account.

Google's custom domain started in 2006 as "Google Apps for Your Domain." The service has been through a bunch of name changes since then—"Google Apps for Work," then "G Suite," and now "Google Workspace"—but the setup has always been the same: You get Gmail and other Google apps, but they've been custom branded for your company, giving them a more professional appearance than a gmail.com email address.

These were mostly fully functional Google accounts, and there's no way to export things like content purchases for books, movies, music, and apps.

It would have been nice to see the company go the extra mile and offer users an easy way to port their data to a free consumer account with a new email address.

If you got your Google Apps account through some kind of bundled service, like a domain hosting site, you'll probably want to check with it.