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Google Workspace for Nonprofits is genuinely free. The application should take a few days. In practice organisations circle for weeks: verification fails, the status never changes, and support replies with a link to the page you have already read.
Nearly every stuck application fails in one of three places.
1. Domain ownership is not proven
Google asks you to prove the domain is yours, usually with a TXT record in DNS. The two classic mistakes: the record gets added at the registrar while DNS is actually served elsewhere, or someone keeps re-requesting verification every hour. DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate, and re-requesting does not speed anything up.
2. The organisation is not approved by Goodstack
Google does not verify nonprofit status itself. A partner does: Goodstack (formerly TechSoup ecosystem). That is a separate check, before Google Workspace is granted, with its own document requirements per country. If this step is incomplete, nothing you do inside Google will move the application.
3. Eligibility is misread
Religious congregations, schools and government bodies have separate rules. Latvian biedrība and nodibinājums structures qualify in most cases, but the registry extract has to match the name on the application exactly. A one-word mismatch is enough to fail silently.
What you get when it works
- Workspace for Nonprofits: free, unlimited users and 100 TB of pooled storage for the whole organisation.
- Discounted Business Standard and Plus tiers if you need recordings, larger storage or booking pages.
For most small organisations the free tier is enough. Set it up properly once: users, shared drives and security work the same as in any business.
If you are stuck right now
Check the three points above in order: DNS record visible from outside, Goodstack status approved, registry name matching. If everything looks right and the application still sits, talk to us. We are a Google Cloud Partner and we have walked several organisations through exactly this loop. The fix is usually one detail, not a new application.
