Google Plays "Hide the Free Version" with Apps for Domains
A few years back, Google introduced a free service called "GMail for Domains" - in a nutshell, it allowed domain name owners to use the GMail service for their domain's EMail accounts. Later, this was renamed to "Google Apps for Domains" when it was expanded to included other Google apps like Docs & Calendar, around the same time that Google started offering a paid version for businesses. Unfortunately, this was also right around the time that they started making the free version progressively more & more difficult to find (just a coincidence, no doubt).
For example, this post from 2008 describes how the only way to signup for the free version was to start the signup process for a trial of the paid version, and then click a "Compare to Standard Edition" link on the second page. Four years later, and even that option is no longer available - in fact, Google's main page for the service doesn't contain even a single reference to the free version (and refers to the service only as "Google Apps for Business").
Fortunately, there is still a way to sign up for the free version - as of this writing (August 28th, 2012), the only signup link for "Standard" (free) version is on the Google Apps Pricing page (you can also go directly to the signup link for the free version).
