{"id":8512,"date":"2026-07-30T18:57:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T15:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erticaz.com\/ok-goldy-alternative\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T19:21:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:21:12","slug":"ok-goldy-alternative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erticaz.com\/en\/ok-goldy-alternative\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did Ok Goldy stop? The engineering lesson behind the failure \u2014 and the free alternative"},"content":{"rendered":"

For years, thousands of Google Workspace administrators around the world relied on a free tool called Ok Goldy to accomplish what used to take weeks of manual work. Today, it has stopped. In this article, we dissect exactly what happened, thank those who deserve thanks, and present the free alternative we built at Erticaz \u2014 with a complete usage guide.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude4f First: A well-deserved thank you to Goldy Arora<\/h2>\n

Before any technical talk, this must be said clearly: Goldy Arora<\/strong> He provided the tech community with a completely free tool, built it in his own time, and saved thousands of organizations around the world cumulative years of exhausting manual work \u2014 without asking for anything in return.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has ever managed creating three thousand student accounts one by one from the Google Admin console knows the magnitude of what he provided. Ok Goldy was not just a tool; it was the only free solution in a space where all alternatives are paid.<\/p>\n

And when its owner apologized for not continuing due to personal circumstances, he did so frankly and announced it clearly instead of letting it rot silently. This is respectable behavior that deserves appreciation, not blame.<\/p>\n

This project is not a competitor to his work, but an extension of it.<\/strong> The original idea \u2014 managing Google Workspace from a spreadsheet \u2014 is his idea. What we did is rebuild it with a different architecture, after its shutdown revealed an engineering lesson worth telling.<\/p>\n

What exactly happened?<\/h2>\n

Users began encountering one repeated message on any operation:<\/p>\n

Resource has been exhausted (e.g. check quota)<\/code><\/pre>\n
The message seems vague, but it is in fact very precise: The API quota has been exhausted<\/strong>. And the important question is not \"what does it mean\" but: Whose quota exactly was exhausted?<\/em><\/p>\n
The answer is the essence of the story<\/h3>\n
When a tool is published on the Google Workspace Marketplace, API calls for all its users operate through a single Google Cloud project owned by the developer<\/strong> \u2014 not through each organization's own project.<\/p>\n
Every cloud project has a daily cap on requests. And when the tool was used by thousands of institutions around the world at the same time, they were all consuming from the same bucket<\/strong>. A university creating five thousand student accounts in the morning was consuming a quota that a hospital on another continent needed hours later.<\/p>\n
So when that cap ran out, the tool didn't break down for one or two users \u2014 but for everyone at once<\/strong>. And no user could do anything about it, because the problem wasn't with their account in the first place.<\/p>\n
\n
The outage wasn't a maintenance oversight so much as the inevitable result of an architectural decision: the tool's very success is what killed it<\/strong>. The more users it gained, the closer its collapse came. And the developer bears the cost and quota of every user for free \u2014 a model that doesn't hold up mathematically.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
What sets Uruk Workspace apart?<\/h2>\n
We built the tool from scratch, and addressed every single point of failure.<\/p>\n
1. Your quota is yours alone \u2014 this is the fundamental difference<\/h3>\n
We don't publish it on a Marketplace as a centralized service. Instead, you copy your own instance<\/strong>. The instance automatically gets an independent Google Cloud project belonging to your own institution.<\/p>\n
The direct result: no other user in the world can exhaust your quota<\/strong>. The outage that struck Ok Goldy is architecturally impossible here, not because we're more careful but because the structure itself is different.<\/p>\n
2. An error in one row doesn't stop the rest<\/h3>\n
Each row is processed separately. If row number 47 has an invalid email, it is marked as ERROR<\/code> The reason is written next to it, and the tool completes the remaining five thousand rows without stopping.<\/p>\n
3. Successful rows are never repeated<\/h3>\n
Every row that succeeds is marked OK<\/code>, and is skipped in any subsequent run. That is, re-running is always safe<\/strong> \u2014 accounts will not be created twice, and invitations will not be sent again.<\/p>\n
4. Automatic resumption for large numbers<\/h3>\n
Google Apps Script stops any script after six minutes. The tool stops safely before that, saves its position, and resumes automatically after a minute \u2014 until it finishes the entire table. Twenty thousand users are processed without any intervention from you.<\/p>\n
5. Gradual backoff at rate limits<\/h3>\n
When encountering rateLimitExceeded<\/code> or a temporary server error, the tool waits and retries with exponential backoff instead of failing immediately. And if the error is a real quota issue, it explains it to you in understandable language instead of showing the raw message.<\/p>\n
6. Dry-run mode before any change<\/h3>\n
The option Dry run<\/strong> checks every row and writes to you what would have happened<\/em> \u2014 without sending any change to Google. You run it, read the results, fix your errors, then actually execute.<\/p>\n
7. Deletion requires written confirmation<\/h3>\n
Deletion operations do not execute any row unless you write the word DELETE<\/code> explicitly in it. A wrong click on the menu cannot empty your organization's directory.<\/p>\n
8. Fully open source<\/h3>\n
The code is published in full under the MIT license at GitHub<\/strong><\/a>. Your security team can review every line before relying on it \u2014 something that cannot be done with a closed tool that manages your organization's accounts and passwords. And if you find a bug or want a feature, open issue<\/a> and we will work on it.<\/p>\n
What does the tool do?<\/h2>\n
21 ready-made operations distributed across five areas:<\/p>\n