[gizmo]

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.

[hbn]

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."