[entropyie]

I pay my cable company a comparable amount of money per month, and if it's broken, they will spend an hour on the phone with me fixing it.

I can open a bank account, save €30 per month, and get in person support and advice in branch.

This argument just doesn't hold.

[lillecarl]

The difference would be in how many "fake" support calls one would get. If your internet doesn't work it's probably broken and on the provider, if your cloud is broken you're probably holding it wrong.

The comparison isn't apples to apples, it's 1 service vs 100's (with documentation).

As mentioned, I understand why this is a separate product and I think it's reasonable to pay for support if you need help. There's been some great examples of GCP support bending over backwards to find the most convoluted problems you could imagine. (1)

That'd be worth 30 usd a month to me.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235995

[entropyie]

That's fair, and as I posted recently, I am not against charging a one off fee per support call, especially for free tier customers... but as a reference, I have a super cheap cpanel shared hosting plan, less than €15 per month, and I get my support tickets resolved same day from staff based in the EU. If they can do it, so can Google... Paying customers have rights, and I sometimes think that the great "innovation" of saas/cloud is not tech, it's breaking social norms that every other business is following. That is to our detriment.