Gmail for business: why a free @gmail.com is not a business account

One difference, and everything follows from it

A free account is created by a person, for that person. A Workspace account is created by an organisation, on a domain the organisation owns, and can be suspended, transferred or deleted by an administrator. Ownership is the whole distinction. Storage, admin controls, meeting limits and support are consequences of it.

That is why "can I just use Gmail for my business" has two correct answers depending on how many people are involved and what you would lose if an account walked out of the door.

When a free account is genuinely fine

Nobody needs to sell you a subscription you do not yet need. A free personal Google account is a reasonable place to start when all of the following are true.

• You are the only person in the business, and there is no one to administer.
• Nobody sends you documents that would be a problem to lose.
• Your video calls are short, or one to one.
• You have no domain yet, so there is nothing to put in the address anyway.

A freelance designer, a Lok Sewa tuition teacher taking bookings, a market trader testing whether an idea has customers: none of them need an admin console in month one.

Four moments it stops being fine

1. You hire someone

The moment a second person handles customer mail, you need an account you can take back. With Workspace an administrator suspends a leaver, transfers their Drive and Calendar data to a colleague, then deletes the user. Google keeps a deleted user's data for 20 days so the account can still be restored, after which it is gone. On a free account, if the person who created it does not hand over the password, there is nothing to transfer.

2. You start invoicing

Payment instructions sent from a public address are the easiest thing in the world to impersonate. With a domain and the authentication records that go with it, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, receiving systems can check that a message claiming to be from your company came from your company. Setting them up is part of creating a domain email.

3. Your meetings run long

Free personal Meet limits a group call of three or more people to 60 minutes. Every Workspace edition allows 24 hours, with 100 participants on Business Starter, 150 on Standard and 500 on Plus. Recording, noise cancellation and breakout rooms start at Business Standard. If you teach online or run client review calls, the 60-minute cut-off decides this for you.

4. Storage becomes a shared problem

On a free account, storage belongs to one person and is shared across their Gmail, Drive and Photos. Workspace storage is pooled across the organisation: 30 GB times the number of users on Starter, 2 TB times users on Standard, 5 TB times users on Plus, all in one pool that any user can draw from. If the pool is exceeded by 25%, or stays over for 14 days, users can no longer add files to Drive or create new Docs, Sheets and Slides, so it is a number to watch rather than ignore.

Side by side

Gemini is not the same on both

Since 16 January 2025 Gemini features are part of the Business and Enterprise plans rather than a paid add-on, but the scope differs by edition. Business Starter gets Gemini in Gmail, meaning Help me write, Proofread, suggested replies, thread summaries and AI overview for search, plus the Gemini app at Standard access and Gemini Notebook at the lower tier. At Standard access, chats may be reviewed by humans and used to improve Google's models.

Business Standard and Plus add Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides and the Drive side panel, Meet "Take notes for me", speech translation and translated captions, and the Gemini app at Pro access, where chats and uploads are not reviewed by humans or used to improve models. Gemini in Workspace does not use customer content to train models. An administrator has to enable the Gemini app in the Admin console, and users must be 18 or older.

Moving over does not mean starting again

The usual worry is losing years of mail. You do not. The Admin console data import tool pulls history from a single-user Gmail account, from cPanel or other IMAP webmail, from Zoho or from Microsoft 365, so the new mailbox opens with the old conversations in it. Messages over 25 MB including attachments are skipped, which is worth knowing before you count the results.

The switch itself is a DNS change: one MX record, host @, priority 1, value smtp.google.com. Propagation can take up to 72 hours, so both systems overlap for a short period and a second delta import after the cutover catches anything that arrived late. Google makes no zero-downtime claim, and the honest description is that mail keeps flowing with a short window where new messages can land in either place. The full sequence is in the migration guide.

Your personal account does not have to disappear either. Most owners keep it for personal use and stop using it for business, which is the point of the exercise.

What it costs to stop being free

Business Starter through WebsNP is $2.78 per user per month, $25.83 per user per year, paid in NPR. Google's own list price for the same edition is $7 per user per month on the annual fixed-term plan, billed in US dollars by card, because NPR is not a supported Google billing currency.

Two licences for a two-person company is a smaller number than most people expect, and info and sales addresses do not need licences at all because groups and aliases are free. What each edition includes is on Business Starter, and the reasons a business moves are set out at length on business email with Google Workspace. Google also offers a 14-day free trial for up to ten users if you want to test it directly first.