[roughly]

What's always frustrated me about Google is that I would pay a substantial amount of money on an ongoing basis for the capabilities they could provide, but I'm absolutely not willing to pay what they're asking and what they're asking is tanking their products.

Google as a products and services company - Google with Apple's business model - is something I would've been a happy customer of for the last decade or two easily. Google as an ads company is an entity I go to great efforts to remove from my life.

[paganel]

There's also the very, very big (and very hidden) opportunity cost of always incurring the danger of having your Google account getting nuked by Google itself, with almost no possibility of recourse, for some small payment inconsistency related to any of their products, no matter how big or small.

That's why I personally would never pay Google other than for very basic and needed stuff like GMail, I wouldn't want my email account nuked and my life momentarily turned upside down because of some payment misunderstandings related to their streaming service, let's say.

[acdha]

I think that’s the same problem: once they did the acquisition with DoubleClick, everything solidified into “we don’t have to do customer service, our customers are advertisers” at the same time they were trying to push everyone to turn more substantial parts of their lives than search over to them.

[jessekv]

I was thinking something similar earlier.

I am huge fan of youtube and the incredible content and creators on the platform. If it was not owned by Google, I would probably happily pay 50 bucks a month for an ad-free and tracking-free experience.

But instead I've mostly left the platform. I don't want the company with eyes all over the internet to also know exactly what I watch and when. It's creepy to have a single company know exactly what you did/read/watched for most of your waking hours.