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by gizmo 1145 days ago
I never understand this kind of moralistic thinking about pricing. If you get more storage than you need for a price you're willing to pay you should be happy. You get the storage you need and then some.

I pay for Netflix and I watch less than 2 movies a month. Am I angry because I'm paying for the right to watch multiple movies/shows every day which I will never have time for? No. I get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.

Every time you buy a piece of software or hardware you get features you don't care about. Do I get angry that these features are included? Of course not. I just don't use them.

But somehow when it comes to quotas people feel like the price should somehow correspond to the cost of delivering the service. But it doesn't. It's just price segmentation, and as long as the pricing tiers are clearly advertised I don't think you have any right to be mad.

1 comments

Those examples you gave are totally different. The service they're offering is renting out storage space on their servers. The most logical way to price that is to determine what dollar amount they want to charge to rent out X amount of space and just let me choose how many chunks of that I want to rent. It's not like when you pay for 2TB they physically reserve it for you like a plot of land. They're only actually giving you 2TB of storage space if you're using all of it.
For services like these, whether it's Google One or Dropbox, R&D is the major expense. Not hard drive space. In order to recoup the R&D cost you have to segment customers by their willingness to pay. When you charge per GB you leave a lot of money on the table.

Google has spent billions in R&D for gmail, google docs/sheets, photos. And now I have to choose between deleting my old stuff or paying for extra storage. Figuring out where my data went is too much work, so I subscribed. Other people will delete old photos/attachments/files so they don't have to upgrade to the next pricing tier. Price segmentation works.

I mean I'm not arguing that I shouldn't have to pay. I just think the tiers and prices are bad.

If I had a car that could hold my family of 4, and then I have another kid and my only option to upgrade from there is a school bus, I'm gonna be understandably annoyed. And you could just as easily say "well they don't make enough on cars so they need more people buying buses."