[Brahma111]

I am not surprised for IBM but Google could do a heck of a better job if they treated their customers a bit better. They suddenly make changes to their policies and don't care a bit while discontinuing services who don't update their products. I had two very bad experience with Google. The first was when Firebase was still a niche and we built our product on top of it. Then they made an update where certain features were deprecated in the tier that we were in. One fine day the product stopped working.

The second was a more recent one where our app was discontinued from their playstore because they updated their SMS policies. All their communication were landing to my Bulk folder. Even HN has some horror stories about their 'couldn't care less' attitude.

[asciimike]

Early Firebase PM here: which feature was this? I don't remember us making decisions where things abruptly stopped working, but please let me know what happened and I'll take a look.

[Brahma111]

Thanks for getting back. How can I reach you? I can send you the details. We were not even in the free tier. But for some reason after having our credit card information for close to 6 months, it was disabled since some more information was suddenly asked. I agree that some of it might be legal. But for heaven's sake don't automate the hell out everything

[avip]

Let me guess: "the tier that we were in" was the free tier?

[jussij]

And it may well be that "the tier that we were in" was the free tier.

But my question would be why did Google enter a paying field with a free option, knowing full well it would kill off all those paying players, to only then kill their free option knowing all competition is now gone?

Google should not be offering up any service, free or otherwise that has a use by date that is only known to Google.

[dragandj]

May be so, but Google made sure that "the tier they were in" stays "nothing by Google, ever" for that particular company.