Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this G suite for business review, do you even need to pay for G suite for business?
We're going to look at the top five reasons why you might actually be better off just
sticking with the free version and skipping the 6 to 25 dollars a month price tag per
user, that's G suite is.
So there's a timestamp table of contents in the description along with the video that
walks you through why G suite might actually be a good solution.
Here we're going to be all negative and talk about the top five reasons you might just
want to save your money.
Now, the first reason deals with Google docs, spreadsheets, and of course presentations
and drawings.
So, if you've been using any one of those as you go, you know what?
I really wish it had this feature, I really wish I could do more with this.
Well, you're out of luck because if you pay the 6 to 12 dollars a month, you're going
to get the exact same product.
There's really no additional feature sets, when it comes to the suite of Google docs,
presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings.
The version you have for free, and the version that's in paid is pretty much the exact same
feature set.
So if you're looking to upgrade because you want to do more with one of those offerings
from Google, there's no reason to, because it will do the exact same thing.
Now, reason number two, you might actually want to just stick with the free version comes
to file sharing.
And this is because all of these sharing or almost all of the sharing features that are
available in the paid versions, I'll get to the differences in a little bit here, is available
with the free version.
So if you have a variable set of people that you work with, whether it's clients or you're
bringing on freelancers, just part time, then the free version will actually have all the
sharing settings that you need.
One of the key differentiators with the paid version is the extra controls it gives you
in terms of restricting access on or at the organization level.
Of course, most of those restrictions, whether we're looking at team drives, which we'll
get to later, or we're just looking at normal individual drives really only applies to people
who are also part of the organization, which means those advanced features and controls
only apply for paying 6 or 12 dollars a month per user.
So with the free version of Google drive, you can still share folders and you can still
share individual files with specific people, without having to pay for a user license for
them to use it, which means everyone can have their own personal Gmail address and access
the specific files that you want them to.
Now, something that's cool with the paid version of G suite, that you're not going to get in
the free one is it's very easy to remove someone from all the files everywhere.
Whereas with the free version you are going to need to remember which files and which
folders you gave people access to.
Now, reason number three, you might want to just stick with the free version, comes down
to the control features.
Now there are a lot of really cool control features that G suite offers you in terms
of looking at analytics of how people are using the applications across your business,
and also some data retention things where you can set up some custom things as to how
long chats are available or how long emails are available.
And it's very easy to search and find stuff, if you have a large team.
However, after three or four years of using G suite, I have yet to use any of those advanced
controls and yet to even care about them, right?
So, I do run a digital marketing agency.
So that will be important in terms of the type of business you're running.
So, if your business is very heavy on compliant or you're doing anything in healthcare and
finance, that's really going to be important, but for the other 8 out of 10 businesses,
it’s probably not going to matter all that much, plus for us, most of our conversations
take place in our project management app Asana, which means all of those controls and retention
settings that we have inside of G suite really just doesn't do anything at all.
So, if you're using another application outside of G suite chats or Hangouts to, pretty much
communicate with your team, then a lot of those controls, aren't going to matter either.
Now, reason number four comes to team drives, and this is in kind of conjunction with sharing.
And I touched on this a little bit, but something that's really cool with team drives when you're
paying $12 a month or more, is you can separate all of the files from an individual.
So as you are using the free version right now, all the files are owned by you or somebody
else.
Whereas in team drives, it's owned by the company.
So if you delete or make changes, it applies to everyone, whereas with individual files
that are owned by individual people, you have to remove their access and then delete the
file.
Otherwise everybody still has access to the file.
So that is a disadvantage of the free version.
But if you're doing a lot of external work where you're not trying to have 10 to 20 people
on your internal team and you're managing them, you're just working with a lot of other
people.
Then team drives is actually going to be an absolute pain.
Because team drives does not allow you to share folders.
You have to share individual files, which is actually more cumbersome than the free
version of Google drive.
Now I'm sure that they're eventually going to fix this in the future, but for now it's
really annoying because if you create a team drive and you want to share whatever's inside
it, you're either going to have to share file by file with the individual person, or you're
going to have to give them access to everything in the team drive, which kind of defeats the
purpose of bringing on a temporary worker or providing a client.
Because now you have to make two team drives one for the client and one for all your internal
stuff.
And you hope that your internal notes never accidentally go into the wrong place.
So really team drives is, only helpful if you're working with a hundred percent internal
team, if you're trying to bring other people in, even temporarily, it's just going to be
a nightmare.
We've had so many random problems with team driver links, not even working when we're
trying to give a one specific file externally, I've just found it way easier to just use
our own personal team drive, to share things outside of our team.
Now, reason number five, when it comes to why you should just stick with the free version.
And that is because you actually, if you want any of the events features, you can just hack
the system and only pay for one account, which is what I did in the beginning when I was
on a really tight budget.
So, if you have $12 a month, you can purchase one G suite user license and you'll have access
to all of the features.
And then you can just add and remove people, using their personal Gmail addresses.
So, something that I did in the beginning is I set up one G suite business account,
and that was for the company.
So, I didn't call it Jason at, you know, our company dot com.
I just called it our company at our company dot com.
And then I created team drives and I added all of the contractors and freelancers to
those team drives using everyone else using their personal Gmail addresses and only one
was actually being paid.
And it worked out pretty well.
Now, obviously now we have a lot more licenses just because it's easier and we need to control
our data a lot more than we did when we first started.
But that is a cool hack where you can just purchase one, you'll have a terabyte of storage
space.
So, it's pretty hard to get to that, especially if you're not making videos.
And it's just a really easy way to take advantage of some of the features without paying 12
or 6 dollars for every single user on your team.
So I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video and it kind of showed you what
you can and can't do, and really how much money you can save, especially if you're getting
started and you have a small team of less than 5 or 10 people.
So go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe for more reviews, just like this one over
on my channel, I do a lot of content around building sales funnels, figuring out your
digital marketing and of course, productivity and organization stuff like this to make sure
that your business is running smoothly and you're not paying too much for that productivity
software.
So, go ahead and comment blow if you have any questions and until the next, keep building
the business you love.