[twawaaay]

Free account?

When you are paying customer you are also getting the privilege of contacting the support.

I think it is fair that Google does not want to directly talk to billions of people using their services and not paying a cent for it. You get it for free? It is up to you to make sure you don't loose access.

[weberer]

>It is up to you to make sure you don't loose access.

The problem in my case was that Google changed the rules halfway through. I kept my username and password perfectly secure in my password manager. But one day they suddenly decided that I can't log in until I respond to an SMS code they sent to a phone number they somehow got from me 12 years ago that I no longer have access to. It would be fair for them to not suddenly force SMS MFA without the user's consent.

[ashurov]

Yes, free account. And having lost the ability to do 2FA I probably won’t be able to upgrade it. I’m fine paying for support, but that is not even provided as far as I know (for free accounts).

[twawaaay]

It is a bit as with insurance. You pay insurance in case something happens. The insurance model is based on the assumption that a lot of people will be paying for it without getting the insurance back, otherwise it does not make financial sense.

The cheapest paid workspace account is cheap enough that it probably costs less than processing a single support ticket. Remember, when you loose access you are probably looking at multiple touch points and multiple people on their side to get you back. You wouldn't want any single person to be able to just change whatever they want?

So if they allowed it, people would just pay for the privilege once to get the problem resolved and then downgrade themselves back after one month.

The issue here is that the ratio of free accounts to paid accounts is so high that if any support was allowed for unpaid accounts it would absolutely deluge the system and paid accounts would have to pay a lot more to cover the cost of support for unpaid accounts.

But I do think they could provide a paid support ticket where you can pay an amount that would cover their costs (and of course then some) for a single support request.

The issue with this is that somebody could do this to "recover" account that does not belong to them. Paradoxically, there is some extra security in not allowing any social hacking by just not allowing any manual work on the account.

[ghaff]

>The issue with this is that somebody could do this to "recover" account that does not belong to them. Paradoxically, there is some extra security in not allowing any social hacking by just not allowing any manual work on the account.

That's the problem. The more flexible you are with helping a customer, especially just over a phone or computer, the more open you are to social engineering attacks. At least in the US, there are various processes involving notarized/Medallion signatures and the like. But at that point some not insignificant number of people will complain the processes are too onerous, they don't have a local bank, etc.

[ashurov]

I wouldn’t mind paying a premium instead of a monthly insurance fee to get this resolved. And I have time, it doesn’t need to get resolved today.