Google Apps Script for Business

The platform does not — it is included with Google Workspace and there is no server to pay for. What costs money is the development, and then the ownership: somebody has to understand it, somebody has to notice when it breaks, and somebody has to change it when your process changes. We quote those separately and explicitly, because a script with no owner is a liability dressed as an asset, and the alternative is a pleasant conversation now and an unpleasant one in two years.

No, on two counts. Google publishes a limit of 1,500 email recipients per day for Workspace accounts, so the arithmetic stops most mailing lists before anything else does. More importantly, pushing marketing volume through your own business domain risks the deliverability of your ordinary mail — the invoices and quotations that have to arrive. Use a platform built for bulk sending, keep your domain for correspondence, and get SPF, DKIM and DMARC right on both. Figures checked against Google's documentation in September 2026.

Google's documentation states that installable triggers always run under the account of the person who created them. The consequence follows directly: if that account is suspended or deleted — which is exactly what a correct offboarding process does — whatever the script was doing stops, and usually without telling anybody. If the code also sits in that person's personal Drive rather than a Shared Drive, it goes with them too. Both are avoidable in advance and expensive to fix afterwards, which is why we set both up at build time rather than offering them as an upgrade.

You can, and for a small operation with a handful of people it may genuinely be the right answer for a while. Be clear-eyed about what you are choosing: Sheets is not a database. Simultaneous edits can overwrite one another, nothing stops a reference pointing at a record that no longer exists, and performance degrades as rows accumulate. The failure mode is not that it breaks early — it is that it works well enough for two years, becomes the place the business really keeps its data, and then has to be migrated under pressure. If you are building something the business will depend on, decide deliberately rather than by drift.

Six minutes per execution, according to Google's published quotas, for both Workspace and consumer accounts. Triggers have a separate daily allowance — 6 hours a day on a Workspace account against 90 minutes on a consumer account. Google also states plainly that all quotas are subject to reduction or change at any time without notice, so anything sitting close to a limit is fragile by design and worth architecting away from rather than tuning.

You do. It lives in a Shared Drive in your tenant, authorised by an account you control, and it is written to be read by somebody other than its author. We would rather be re-engaged because you want something new than retained because nobody else can understand what we left behind — and if you want another developer to take it over, that should be an afternoon's handover rather than an archaeology exercise.

Often not, and it is worth checking before commissioning anything. Gmail filters, groups, templates, appointment schedules and a Google Form writing into a Sheet cover a large share of what gets described as needing a script, cost nothing, and can be maintained by whoever is already there. Apps Script earns its place when something genuinely cannot be expressed as configuration, or has to run unattended on a schedule. We set out that ladder on the automation page, cheapest layer first.