Increasing prices and upgrading services is fine. What is not acceptable is breaking existing contracts and promises. This used to be a reliable, trus
...tworthy company, but with the current mailbox fiasco, I am no longer sure.
Last year, at Gandi's instigation ("We strongly encourage you to renew your domains before February 1, 2023 in order to benefit from the current rates for as long as the registration period allows.") I renewed my .net domain for 9 years. This registration included two mailboxes, as advertised in big letters on the website at the time (e.g., "Each domain name purchased at Gandi includes 2 email mailboxes").
In June 2023, Gandi announced their new, improved mailbox offering with increased prices. Deep down in this email they briefly mention that the existing mailbox service will end in November.
Any decent company would move their existing customers with running contracts to the new service, or keep the old service running: these customers have been promised two mailboxes, and they should still be offered two mailboxes until their current contract ends. You do not raise prices or remove services from existing contracts, you wait until it is time to renew.
Not so Gandi: for existing contracts such as mine, the mailboxes are to be removed in November this year, even if the contract has many years left. They offer no alternative and no compensation.
Instead, the customer service provides a close reading of the terms and conditions in an attempt to argue that the promises made on the website do not actually have to be kept. For example, they argue: the mailboxes, once prominently featured on the website as one of the benefits of registering your domain with Gandi, are actually "not part of the registration" after all, but were a "free" extra service that can be removed as Gandi sees fit. Laughable if it weren't sad.
I am very disappointed to see that Gandi tries to use the fine print in their terms and conditions to wriggle out of earlier promises. See similar comments on this site and elsewhere: a complete disregard for existing commitments.
Gandi used to be a decent company and the support is still friendly, but if this is not resolved correctly, I would discourage anyone from doing business with them.
