[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.