I Saved $1,500 a Year by Creating a Google Account Like a Normal Person

I need to tell you about the stupidest $1,500/year I almost spent, and the embarrassingly simple thing I did instead. This is a story about email avatars, vanity, and the tech industry's longest-running upsell.

The Vanity

Let's get this out of the way: I care about my email avatar. I care about it more than a grown man should. I care about it the way some men care about their lawn or their watch or their fantasy football team. Irrationally. Disproportionately. In a way that, if described to a therapist, would probably lead to a productive conversation about deeper issues.

Here's why. When I send an email to a prospective client, I want them to see my face, not a grey circle with my initials or some generic silhouette. A grey circle says "this might be spam." A photo says "I'm a real person with a real business." Every email platform in the world lets you set a profile photo and shows it to the people you email.

Every platform except, apparently, the one that matters.

The Discovery

I have a Microsoft 365 account that I pay good money for, and I've got a beautiful profile photo set up - professional, trustworthy, the kind of headshot that says "this man knows what he's doing," which is mostly accurate.

And it shows up exactly nowhere that matters. If I email another Outlook user, they see my photo, which is great if you consider "two Outlook users recognizing each other" to be a meaningful communication strategy. If I email a Gmail user - which is most of the world - they see nothing. Just the initials AW floating in a grey circle.

I discovered this by accident when a client mentioned it. "I almost missed your email," she said. "It looked like spam." She wasn't being cruel - it was simply true. An email with no face and no logo, landing in a Gmail inbox full of emails that do have faces and logos, looks like something your spam filter should have caught.

I sat with this information for about ten minutes, and then did what any reasonable person would do: I Googled it.

The $1,500 Answer

Google told me about BIMI, which stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification - a very fancy name for "your logo shows up next to your emails." It's a legitimate industry standard that Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail all support, and it's the official, sanctioned, industry-approved way to get your brand to show up in email inboxes across the world.

It requires a Verified Mark Certificate, which costs $1,500 a year. Recurring. To get a small round picture to show up next to your emails - the same thing every social media platform in the world lets you do for free. I closed the tab and kept searching.

The Gravatar Detour

Someone on a forum said to use Gravatar.

Gravatar is a free service from the people who made WordPress - been around since 2004, older than most of the people making TikToks about email marketing. You upload a photo, associate it with your email address, and any platform that supports Gravatar will show your photo.

It's also completely useless for this purpose, because Gmail doesn't support Gravatar, and neither do Outlook, Yahoo, or Apple Mail. Gravatar works on WordPress comment sections and some project management tools, but not in any email client that matters.

The Google Workspace Suggestion

Several articles suggested Google Workspace. Pay Google $7 a month per user, get a custom domain email hosted on Gmail's infrastructure, and your Google profile photo will show up to other Gmail users because you're now part of the Google ecosystem.

This is technically true, and also insane. I already have email hosting that I already pay Microsoft for. I'm not going to migrate my entire email infrastructure to a different platform, set up MX records, move my mailboxes, retrain my muscle memory, and pay Google eighty-four dollars a year per user, just so a little circle with my face in it shows up in a Gmail inbox.

That's not a solution, that's a hostage situation.

The Moment

I was about to give up and accept that my emails would forever arrive in Gmail inboxes looking like anonymous dispatches from a faceless corporation - resign myself to the grey circle life.

And then I found a forum comment - buried in a thread from 2023, no upvotes, no replies: "Just create a Google account with your existing email. It's free." It seemed too simple, but also too specific to be wrong.

The Fix

Go to accounts.google.com/signup. When it asks you to choose a Gmail address, don't. Look for the small text that says "Use your existing email," and click it. Type in your business email address - wherever it's hosted. Google sends you a verification code, you enter it, set a password, set a profile photo.

You now have a Google account - not a Gmail account, not a Google Workspace account - just a plain Google account that associates your profile photo with your email address across Google's ecosystem, including Gmail. The next time you send an email from your@yourdomain.com to a Gmail user, your face shows up in their inbox instead of a grey circle.

Ninety seconds, zero dollars.

The Arithmetic

BIMI with a Verified Mark Certificate: $1,500/year, requires DMARC enforcement and a trademarked logo, takes weeks to set up. Over five years that's $7,500. Google Workspace: $84/year, requires migrating your email infrastructure. Creating a free Google account with your existing email: $0, ninety seconds.

The free option and the $7,500 option do the exact same thing in Gmail: your photo shows up next to your emails.

The Outrage

I want you to understand something: I'm not angry at BIMI. It's a legitimate standard that does more than show a photo - it validates your brand identity, works across multiple email providers, and plugs into a broader email authentication framework. If you're a large enterprise sending millions of emails, BIMI probably makes sense, and the Verified Mark Certificate is a serious thing for serious organizations with serious email volumes.

But I'm not a large enterprise. I'm a guy who sends emails to clients and wants his face to show up. And the fact that the internet's collective wisdom on this topic is "pay $1,500/year for BIMI" or "pay for Google Workspace" when the actual answer is "spend ninety seconds creating a free account" makes me want to throw my laptop into the sea.

The reason this isn't common knowledge is simple: nobody makes money when you create a free Google account. No affiliate commission, no SaaS subscription, no four-part enterprise implementation guide. The free solution doesn't have a sales team or a content marketing department. It just sits on a signup page, waiting for someone to notice the small text that says "Use your existing email."

The Point

If you run a business and send emails from a custom domain, go do this now: accounts.google.com/signup → "Use your existing email" → your@yourdomain.com → verify → set photo → done.