They just needed to offer lots of storage so they could kill off Dropbox, now that it's mostly dead for consumers, it's time for Google to make money with their monopoly. Even though storage prices have gone way down.

Not to mention ending the lifetime free uploads to Photos from Pixel phones

No company will. Apple is the same. 5GB base. But for just $1, you get 50!

It’s a nice bit of reoccurring revenue for big tech right now. No one is getting rid of it. Not in this economic climate.

I bought the 2TB package because my wife needs the extra features for her side-business/hobby, like the appointment slots, no time-limit on Google Meet, etc.

And since we already use Google for most of our stuff it was the rational choice.

Not to mention ending the lifetime free uploads to Photos from Pixel phones

Exactly, I had GSuite and purchased 1tb storage for Drive. Now I've been moved to Workspace and they've cut each user down to 30gb (I'm the only user) and my Drive space doesn't count for any of it. Drive says I have 1tb but Workspace Admin says my user is 300% over the limit.

Google themselves told me I need to purchase more storage (or up the number of users) and try and get a refund on the 1tb storage. Bizarre.

that's not in the plan it won't increase until they dominate the market and lock in the user base and I don't think enough people subscribe yet. squeezing free accounts to put you in the just enough annoyed state. Just like mobile games do.

What is it? I can't even search for it and get a coherent answer.

They've actually been ramping up efforts to get people to pay for storage lately. I've always been fairly close to full, but lately they've started popping up brightly-colored warnings on various interfaces telling me to buy more space.

I did the opposite and got down to like 80% full, and the warnings are still there!

This is a far cry from the original statement that I'd never run out of email storage. (Yes, I use it for other things, too, but I've found myself having to delete emails with attachments to keep storage requirements down.

Yeah, storage costs also don't scale well so why would they? Also since this is Lemmy: Host your own "cloud" storage

I'm close to doing the same. Mostly because of how poorly they handled Google Play Credit cards being hung up in their automated system and basically stiffing me for them. They can't be returned to the store despite Google insisting they can be. I gave up after 13 attempts...

Being more than a Google Drive and YouTube customer I have other Google services I'm not sure it's worth the effort anymore. This is after years of paying monthly fees all because I can't find a human at google to resolve a google play gift card issue on their end. I hope California takes them to the cleaners in the class action over the millions in Google Play they are holding.

It's free money for them as there is no way for many users to redeem or refund these cards bought in grocery stores, online, and/or big box stores. This is the part where I think they have slided into the evil part the early version of them were concerned about.

There is a setting to keep original quality...

Prime Photos is nice but it doesn't include videos, and I also wonder how long it will last. Nobody can really give out so much space for free, both Microsoft and Google tried to do it in the past and they reverted it back.

Or that they would de-duplicate photo storage. Currently, if you upload one from phone+tablet+computer or some other combo of devices, the photos all count towards your storage limit rather than storing one object and having references to that same one object. It is a problem already solved multiple ways.

Honestly, host a next cloud instance and connect it to Storj.

I had something like that but they did remove it eventually