Before I can work inside your Google Workspace, I’ll need a user account on your domain. Cloud Identity Free lets you create one for me at no cost. It’s a Google product designed exactly for this situation. The steps below will walk you through it.
1. Confirm Cloud Identity Free is Active
- Go to Billing > Subscriptions in your Admin Console.
- If Cloud Identity Free isn’t listed as active, click Buy or Upgrade, scroll to the bottom to find it, and complete the (free) checkout. Don’t worry, you won’t be charged anything, Google just needs the checkout process to add the Cloud Identity Free option to your account.
2. Disable Automatic License Assignment
- Go to Billing > License Settings and disable Automatic Licensing. Do this before creating the user, otherwise Google will automatically assign a paid license to the user you create in step 3.
3. Create the User
- Go to Directory > Users and click Add New User.
- Use my first and last name.
- Set the primary email to whatever you like, as long as it makes sense to you. Cloud Identities don’t get an actual email account and cannot receive emails so it doesn’t matter.
- Click Add New User. You can leave Secondary email and Phone number blank.
4. Assign the License
- It may take a few minutes for the new user to appear so keep refreshing the page until the user appears.
- Click the checkbox next to the new user.
- At the top of the page, you should now see an option to Assign licenses. Click it, and in the pop up window that follows, make sure Cloud Identity Free (Free) is checked. Do not check any paid options.
- Click Assign
5. Grant Super Admin Access
- Click on the new user to open their profile.
- Click Admin roles and privileges and then Assign roles.
- Check the box next to Super Admin and click Save. This will give me access to your entire Google Workspace organization, but don’t worry, you can always revoke this later if needed.
6. Share the Credentials
- Copy the temporary password and send it my way, or use Preview and Send to email it directly from the Admin Console.
Heads up: If you skipped step 2, check the new user’s assigned licenses right away and remove any paid ones before your next billing cycle.