Google Workspace

Google Workspace is business email done properly, with the collaboration suite most small businesses were going to need anyway attached. One subscription gets you Gmail on your own domain, shared Drive storage, Docs and Sheets with real-time collaboration, Meet for video calls, Calendar, and Google Chat. Since 2025 Google has folded Gemini AI into every plan, in Gmail on Starter and across Docs and Meet on higher tiers, rather than selling it as a separate add-on.

Pricing, verified against Google’s own Singapore page in July 2026, is refreshingly local: billed in Singapore dollars, at S$9.40 per user per month for Business Starter with 30 GB of pooled storage per person, S$18.80 for Standard with 2 TB, and S$29.40 for Plus with 5 TB. All three cap at 300 users, far above any business reading this site. A 20 percent promotion runs mid-2026, which we mention only so the lower prices you may see do not confuse you; judge it on the standard rates.

The correction worth printing in bold, because half the internet remembers it wrongly: there is no free Google Workspace tier with Gmail. The legacy free G Suite ended in 2022, and the only free product left, Essentials Starter, has no Gmail, which removes the reason most SMBs come here. You get a 14-day trial and then you pay.

Weaknesses are modest and worth knowing. Starter’s 30 GB pooled storage sounds like plenty until a few years of attachments and shared drives land in it, and the jump to Standard doubles your bill. Google Chat is a competent Slack substitute inside the bundle, not a reason to choose the bundle. And a 2018 Lowyat thread praising G Suite’s reliability for Malaysian small business is the freshest local forum sentiment that exists, which says more about where SMB discussion happens now than about the product. For a business that needs email, files and documents under one roof with local billing and published PDPA paperwork, this is the default for a reason. This is our research based read; we will confirm it hands-on and update the review.

Most businesses should start on Starter and expect to feel the 30 GB storage ceiling in year two or three; the honest budgeting assumption is Standard eventually. Ten people on Starter cost about S$1,128 a year, which buys email, storage, docs and video calling together, roughly what ten Slack Pro seats cost for chat alone. That comparison is the whole category in one sentence.