[wccrawford]

When GMail started, they claimed that I'd never need to delete emails and I could always just archive them. I knew that claim was too good to be true, but I figured it'd be a long time before I really needed to worry about it.

Drive now exists and takes up more of that space, but I'm still comfortably away from my limits.

I'm not upset about eventually having to pay for storage, but I was and am upset about their claim that it would never be necessary.

[decasteve]

This has become the pattern. Buying into something on the basis of a value proposition only to have it consistently changed from under you without any recourse. It's a bait-and-switch and that's why it's upsetting.

It's perfectly reasonable to charge for these services and what they are suggesting to charge -- if I were still a Google customer. But that's not how it was sold to everyone. How many competitors did they drive out by taking this approach and undercutting this way for so long?

[Spooky23]

That's unfair with respect to email.

I've had large corporate email environments in my portfolio for about half of my career. As recently as 2017, ~2-3% of a 200k org of those users would exceed the free GMail tier in terms of storage. I don't have the stats in front of me, but I'd put money on 80% of the userbase being less than 10GB.

Big email users are always using email as a filing system. Calling GMail bait-and-switch based on marketing claims made in a 2005 context is a pretty extreme stance. My team at a big enteprise org provided folks with 50-100MB (similar to pre-GMail online offerings) in 2005.

Then Google offered a seemingly limitless service that is to this day practically unlimited for all but the most active user.

[psanford]

There's no bait-and-switch going on here! They've always been perfectly clear in how much storage you get for free. They've never reduced that amount, they have only increased it over time.

[brlewis]

The way email was used when gmail was launched in 2004 meant that the 1GB (at that time) limit would not be reached by normal email users. Large attachments became a thing later.

About the initial 1GB limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve...

[wccrawford]

The initial sales pitch was that it was enough at the time, and the free space would grow as the years went by, so you'd never run out.

Sure enough, I'm way beyond my 1GB initial limit now. I just tried to clean things up yesterday (deleting large items from Gmail and Drive), and even once I exclude the stuff from Drive, it seems like I'm over 10GB of my 15GB.

So for now, it's still true... But it seems less and less likely that it will remain true. Certainly I'm already worrying about it.

That said, I find the interface so much better than the competition that I would pay the $2/mo for 100gb to keep it working. Or find a way to delete a lot of emails that should have been deleted long ago, but I followed their "archive everything" pattern with.

[thrill]

All promises of perpetuity have sell by dates.