[evilduck]

Loss leaders are a thing. I've had a free GSuite account on my personal domain which effectively acted as free job training and contributed to choosing them as an email provider for two companies I've worked for and clearly contributed to vastly more revenue than it would cost to host my personal GSuite account for my next 10 lifetimes. Over the last decade I've slowly but surely stopped recommending Google for anything they offer. It's been a slow attrition but I've wound up at zero.

They've very effectively taken a good chunk of their best evangelists and turned them into detractors. I have no idea if they've done the math and decided that was worth it, but I sure hope they have and it's not just total incompetence from one of the biggest players in the industry.

[daveloyall]

Exactly. As an early adopter, I brought who knows how many souls to gmail. I set up a couple small companies on Google Apps, or whatever they want to call it this year. (Mine is called GAFYD...)

When Google gave me a free HTC Magic handset in San Francisco, I showed it to everyone. I performed tricks with it. I made people want one.

To this day, three members of my immediate family use newer models of my old Pixel phone.

I told a man with a lot of CPU heavy jobs that GCE exists.

I'm talking about "influence" a lot.. but let's be clear, that's not all.

Google knows me--or at least it had the opportunity to. Somewhere between all those referrals and the emails in my mbox files at gmail and GAFYD which pre-date the launch of those services by a decade or my bug reports, or working in one of their datacenters for a while, they should know that I helped them be what they are today.

Maybe they do. Maybe this kind of treatment is what I deserve.

(to reiterate what others have posted, it isn't about the money. It's about the major unplanned migration. Which they still have not notified me about.)