
Google clamps down on free storage - premk
https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/gmail-hooked-us-on-free-storage-now-google-is-making-us-pay
======
hn_throwaway_99
From the article:

> “I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage.
> Felt infinite. Please don’t make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!,” one
> person tweeted in September.

Will journalists PLEASE stop taking tweets from any rando out there and
publishing them as "news". Yes, with hundreds of million of users you can
basically find any quote you want to back up your pet theory.

I feel like I should just open a bunch of twitter accounts and post things
like "Journalist X is a complete idiot" and then write an article about how
the whole world thinks Journalist X is incompetent, with low and behold all
these tweets to back it up!

~~~
pacala
Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian: they can craft any narrative by
choosing which tweets to show in your timeline. The ultimate out-of-context
quoting machine. 140 character limits was set in place for a reason.

~~~
dominotw
> Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian

not sure if gp's point has anything to do with twitter itself or character
limits.

~~~
pacala
gp is complaining about third parties quoting tweets out of context. When
Twitter's raison d'être is out of context quoting. He saw trees, I'm glad to
point at the whole forest.

~~~
V-eHGsd_
gp wasn't talking about tweets being taken out of context. they were talking
about reporters using an entire tweet from a random person to support a random
theory.

~~~
pacala
Tweets _are_ mass produced quotable out of context discourse. To be harvested
to support arbitrary theories.

~~~
V-eHGsd_
it seems like your beef is with twitter generally, but gp (at least by my
reading) was more complaining about the journalists that rely on it in this
particular way, not the underlying platform.

I agree that twitter is a cesspool and does not encourage thoughtful
communication, but it feels a little forced to me in this conversation.

------
kilo_bravo_3
I'm an idiot. Like, hardcore.

This morning I made breakfast and left for work without eating it.

Even I came to the realization that if you don't pay for something you are a
disposable, interchangeable asset to be exploited.

$4.25 per month gets me 25GB at Fastmail.

$1.08 per month gets me a domain name at Namecheap.

$5.33 per month gets me an email address with no ads and no tracking, support
when things go wrong, and an email address that is my actual name at a .com
address that sounds respectable.

If fastmail goes bad? All of my emails are on my computer. I just switch
providers and I can keep the same address.

If namecheap goes bad? I move my domain name to another service.

There are step-by-step easy-to-follow tutorials on how to do what I did that
are so simple to implement that even someone who left their bowl of oatmeal on
the kitchen counter this morning and is really hungry at work could follow
them.

If something isn't worth spending $5.33 per month on, is it really that
important?

I don't pay for HN. If they started screwing with their users, or started
charging for the service I would move on and certainly wouldn't write articles
claiming that YC hooked me then hung me out to dry for cash.

~~~
dontbenebby
Personally I pay for Gsuite because I worry smaller providers aren't well
resourced enough to protect me from attackers.

I trust Google that if I have 2fa enabled and alerts for suspicious activity
going out, they'll protect the infrastructure.

~~~
dleslie
As a non-American, I don't trust the American Government not to compel Google
to provide them access to my data.

~~~
yonaguska
As an American, I also don't trust the American Government to not compel
Google to provide them access to my data. Yes, I know I am supposedly
protected by due process- but Barr is making it explicitly clear that the 4th
amendment does not apply to our digital lives.

~~~
ralusek
Barr? The last 3 administrations.

------
linsomniac
This article seems awfully doom and gloom. I find that:

\- Google provides really good tools for archiving your data. If you want to
reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, archive
it somewhere else, and then clean up items you no longer want. I recently did
this with my photos, I knew I had some huge videos that had been uploaded that
I didn't need (I had edited them into a Youtube video), so I was able to find
and delete them and open up quite a bit of space. I toyed with the idea of
deleting photos 5 years old, once I archived them, but I didn't need to
because of the above.

\- Google provides a lot of value to me for the $3/month I've been spending.
Photo enrichment and searching is something I use all the time. Storage of my
documents and files is very useful and google has been super reliable.

~~~
crispinb
I found it good value until they removed local syncing of Google Photos from
their Gdrive client. That was where most of my data was. Making it only
accessible via a web form download was a huge product downgrade that I don't
think a more customer-responsive company would have risked. So I cancelled my
subs & won't be going back (I'm sure they're quaking in their billionaire
boots).

~~~
techntoke
This! Just look at the threads here:

[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115)

[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/113672044](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/113672044)

Google doesn't want you to be able to sync/backup your own photos anymore.

~~~
crispinb
It's particularly infuriating because it was such a poorly-motivated change.
Customers supposedly found the interaction with Google Drive confusing, so
rather than improve ergonomics, they cretinously remove a lynchpin feature
altogether. I still haven't found a really good alternative.

------
natvert
I love the irony of this: I open the article and start reading. I am told that
Google lured us in w/ free storage, but now I'm going have to pay since I've
used so much storage. Then, a popup is overlaid on the article and the text is
hidden. The popup says this article isn't actually free. I've read too many
free articles on Bloomberg and now I'm going to have to pay for a subscription
to keep reading.

I don't know what to take away from this other than the reminder that every
public company has a duty to shareholders to take people's money! That's the
function of a company: profit. What do we really expect here?

~~~
happytoexplain
I agree that it's ironic/hypocritical. I disagree strongly that we should
simply expect it. Consumer attitude is a real component of capitalism, so it's
self-fulfilling to encourage silence under the theory that we can't affect
anything.

------
hastes
I would be more than happy to pay for gmail, google docs, and an entire suite
of google products with the absolute guarantee legally that they could not and
would not either collect, or sell my information as part of that payment.

I highly doubt that would ever happen though, considering data is the new oil.

Oh well, one can dream.

~~~
cj
It's already possible by moving from a consumer Google account to a G Suite
account.

The main difference between consumer Google accounts and G Suites accounts is
that G Suite accounts come with an extremely comprehensive (complex,
complicated) administration panel which is absolutely overkill for use cases
other than managing G Suite users within a company / organization.

But, you can sign up for G Suite as an individual, and most of the default
settings will just work out of the box without much customization needed.

You will have issues if you want to use things like Google Home or Google Nest
(or any other consumer-only services... Nest thermostats, for example, won't
connect to G Suite accounts and only connect to regular Google consumer
accounts).

Here's Google's guarantee re: legally not collecting / selling your G Suite
data...

> There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans
> to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in G
> Suite Core Services for advertising purposes. [1]

[1] [https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-
white...](https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-
whitepaper/page-6.html)

~~~
etiam
>> There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans
to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in G
Suite Core Services for advertising purposes. [1]

To me that reads a lot like 'Google does indeed collect, scan, use, read,
algorithmically process, mine, analyze, characterize, handle, refine, derive
from, and peruse data in G Suite Core Services, but with the primary purpose
of doing other stuff with it than direct advertising.'

Sorry, if that's actually not fair this time, but with all the doublespeak
about these things for the last decade and a half or so, hedging like that
does not inspire confidence.

~~~
sidibe
Your use of "primary" paints in a worse light than it really is. From the
quote it sounds like they don't use it period for advertising

~~~
etiam
I'm inclined to think I just added some honesty. When they've used it in their
'research and development to better understand your preferences and offer you
better services' or whatnot, do you seriously believe that isn't to interact
with ad targeting and all the other ways they use the models?

------
wbobeirne
I'm actually really interested to see Google start charging for things instead
of the usual cycle of spinning things up and shutting them down when the
business model isn't there. I'd much rather pay 100$ a year for their services
if it would guarantee their availability, and reduce the pressure to
commoditize my data.

~~~
noxToken
Am I going to pay $100/year for the same services and still get ignored when I
get locked out of my account? Enterprise users already pay for Google
services. It seems like recourse for them is no different than a free tier
user (aside from blowing up on Twitter/Reddit/HN). Why would anyone want to
pay for that?

~~~
sct202
It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE
friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you, which is
completely absurd for a company of their size.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Knowing people at Google is absolutely the only way to get help with crucial
issues.

Silly doesn’t begin to describe it.

------
mfer
There are many ways to look at this...

1\. It is great that Google is working to come up income sources other than
ads. This will help diversify their business and motives over time.

2\. This may cause some to think that the money is the only method of payment
for the service that's happening. That payment via our data isn't happening
because money is involved. I hope this does not happen.

3\. It opens the door for competitors who want to charge for a service. If
Google can charge this gives some emotional motivation for others to do it
instead of harvesting and selling data. It's a tiny thing and a bit part but
still a thing.

4\. This is telling that Google isn't making enough money on this data to
justify storing more of it. What does this say about enough for them? How much
data do people want to store and what would it mean?

I'll stop at 4 things. I hope people wonder down these different paths that
are not mutually exclusive.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Given that search data is not very valuable after 3 months I suppose the other
data is less valuable after the same time. This may prompt some users to help
google out by deleting their old less valuable data when they get near their
limits, or if not they may help Google out with some money for storing old
data that otherwise is not valuable for Google.

------
mkr-hn
Short version: Google is offering paid plans for people who exceed the ample
free 15GB of storage. There is so much to criticize Google for, but asking for
money in exchange for a service is not one of them.

~~~
sct202
Yeah weren't people complaining about how they've been suffocating a lot of
industries (like mapping, email) by offering so much for free subsidized by
search ads.

~~~
mkr-hn
There seem to be three broad generations--by adoption, weakly correlated with
age--of internet-savvy people.

1: People who were very active in the BBS/Usenet days and saw the emergence of
the public Internet and web.

2: People (like me) who mainly got on when the .com bubble was warming up.
People in 1 and 2 saw or even had these complaints, and had plenty of
skepticism about ad driven models when they emerged with the growing
realization at Google and other surviving web companies that ads and data
mining could save them after the crash.

3: People who only know the internet _after_ that. Who never knew a time when
the internet was such a big, new thing that people still capitalized the word.

I think most of the people who complain about companies charging for stuff are
in 3 and never knew what we lost when ad-funded silos pushed everything else
out. It doesn't help that a lot of them are, along with 2 and even 1,
struggling to make enough money to survive with so many jobs turned into SaaS
or taken over by big outsourcing firms that don't need as many people.

------
Blackstone4
The journalist is not clear on where the line is here. From what I can tell, I
still have my 15Gb of free storage linked to my Gmail account. It looks like
this is linked to storage associated with legacy Chromebook accounts which
originally came with 200Gb of free storage and now they have to pay for that
data.

------
xiphias2
I'm happy to pay to Google, but I would be happy if in return it would stop
mining my emails. Still, I know that it's too much to ask for.

~~~
mattzito
Google does not mine your emails.

[https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-
security/ensuring-...](https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-
security/ensuring-your-security-and-privacy-within-gmail/)

Disclosure: I work for google on G Suite, but not on Gmail.

~~~
mfer
> We do not process email content to serve ads

This says nothing about email metadata being used in relation to ads or for
uses of content unrelated to ads (e.g., generation of search results).

If I hadn't seen the leaked selfish ledger video [1] I would not look for
these nuances in the language.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-
selfish...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-
ledger-video-data-privacy)

~~~
joshuamorton
There's a linguistic ambiguity in the part of the op here. What is "mining"?

Is spam filtering mining? Is indexing for search (in Gmail) mining? Is
sticking flights on your calendar (and nothing else) mining?

Mining sounds nefarious. Are analysis of emails for the consumer still mining?
If they are, and any scanning of emails is bad, why use Gmail? To me at least,
it's value is the stuff it does for me.

~~~
tyingq
Gmail knows about more than flights. They know everything you've bought and
received an email receipt for:
[https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/878/#tl/search/Category%3...](https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/878/#tl/search/Category%3Apurchases)

There's nothing in their privacy policy that explicitly states they don't use
that info for ad targeting that I can see.

~~~
joshuamorton
What part of "We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other G
Suite services. Google does not collect or use data in G Suite services for
advertising purposes." is ambiguous?[0]

But that's Gsuite, what about consumer Gmail?

"G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and
Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail
service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads
personalization after this change"[1]

[0]:
[https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650](https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650),
under "Does Google use my organization’s data in G Suite services or Cloud
Platform for advertising purposes?"

[1]: [https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-
tractio...](https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-
the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-
align/#targetText=Consumer%20Gmail%20content%20will%20not,time%2C%20including%20disabling%20ads%20personalization).

~~~
tyingq
Where is that? I get redirected to the general Google privacy page from within
free Gmail.

I could read that as for only paid Gsuite Gmail, not free Gmail.

As an aside the "what part of..." leader in your reply comes across as rude.
The resources you are citing aren't an easy find from within free Gmail. And
they aren't in the privacy policy, so what I said remains true.

~~~
joshuamorton
See my edit.

~~~
tyingq
Neither is policy. One is a help doc, the other a blog post. They should
probably codify it into their privacy policy.

~~~
joshuamorton
Edit: [https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-
data/](https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/) See "Gmail" at the bottom:

"Google does not use keywords or messages in your inbox to show you ads.
Nobody reads your email in order to show you ads."

Google's privacy policies are written to be understandable by lay-people.
Describing the specific breakdowns of what things they aren't doing can be
intimidating or scary. So they don't. But the information you care about is
still there, unless you're assuming some weird level of linguistic runaround.

~~~
tyingq
The privacy policy contradicts both. I assume policy would supercede a blog
post if it came down to it.

~~~
joshuamorton
See my edit, the privacy policy doesn't contradict either. (and if memory
serves, the actual Gsuide corp privacy policy is a legalese pdf somewhere,
that does make these things explicit)

------
linuxdude314
Migrating from Google Drive/One is to something like Nextcloud or a personal
NAS is very easy. Just install the desktop application, mount your NAS or
other cloud provides storage, and use your favorite synchronization tool to
sync the data.

I’ve done this before with Nextcloud and a QNAP NAS and it couldn’t be easier.
I highly recommend taking the governance of your data seriously. If you don’t
you may end up losing everything without knowing it.

~~~
ta0987
A personal NAS doesn't have the seamless backup of cloud storage. IMO your
hardware is much more likely to fail than you are likely to get locked out of
your Google account, even if the latter happens to some people. And even if
you have backups, now you need to buy new hardware, reinstall, restore, while
life is still going on, and during which your data is unavailable. I'd love to
not depend on a huge cloud provider but I haven't found a DIY solution that
matches the convenience and seamlessness. There are a few rare could sync
products that claim client side encryption (SpiderOak, ResilioSync & Tresorit)
but they're not fully integrated with Chromebooks, Android and/or iOS. (Right
now I'm using a jury-rigged combination of SpiderOak for backup and Resilio
Sync for sync, but it's kind of a hack. This is not a compensated endorsement,
LOL.)

~~~
darkwater
OTOH if you _get_ locked out of your BigG account and you don't have a backup
elsewhere, you are screwed for good. So, I'd treat HW failures and account
closures on the same level. You just have to think about the possibilities in
your specific case: which HW are you willing to invest on VS how you are going
to behave with your Google account.

~~~
pjc50
When my wife was having issues with OneDrive I built a small tool which used
the API to back up all the files to an external drive, avoiding the OneDrive
sync system entirely. Worked quite well. I imagine similar things might be
useful for people wanting to back up other cloud accounts.

You can do a Google Takeout but that's huge and therefore painful to do
frequently.

------
ipsi
Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4
the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3, for example, or
about what you'd pay for S3 glacier storage, not including transfer costs.

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is about the same price as iCloud, but also charges
for downloads.

Since Backblaze is profitable (as far as I know?), presumably Apple _are_
making money off iCloud storage, but I'm still not sure if I'd use the word
"lucrative" here.

~~~
gruez
>Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly
1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3

...assuming you use exactly that much. If you use something like 250GB, it's
twice the price as s3. If you check the offerings[1], there's a gap in the
200GB-2TB range. I suspect that's to force "average users" (in the 200GB-1TB
range) into paying more than they need, while giving the appearance of being
competitive (if you use all 2TB, which most won't).

[1]

    
    
        50GB: $0.99
        200GB: $2.99
        2TB: $9.99

~~~
shantly
The funny thing about consumer cloud storage is it's only useful if you aren't
using all of it. Stuff just automatically showing up there is the point. If
it's full, that doesn't happen.

------
gandalfian
I would feel more sanguine if they let me sort emails by size making it easier
to trim the bloat.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I think you can use a IMAP client like Thunderbird to clean it up.

(I say "think" because while I use a gmail account in my email client, I only
use it to receive notifications from Google, so no wild folder/tags setup, and
I never check the webmail to see if it matches the emails I see in
Thunderbird)

~~~
ahbyb
Yes you can. You can go to the "All Mail" folder, add the "Size" column to the
list view (right click the columns) and then proceed to sort every email by
size.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-
columns](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns)

------
ineedasername
I've found their prices very reasonable and worth the cost for roughly 50GB in
business and family related photos, with a healthy margin left for growth in
storage needs.

------
sasasassy
One of the complaints, in the article, is not like the others. The people that
have been buying Pixel phones, expecting to have unlimited storage, to find
out with the latest device Google forces your content to be compressed, do
seem to have been tricked. If there's an expectation there, they have the duty
to disclose it.

------
alanbernstein
It's difficult to figure out how storage is used in gmail. I downloaded my
data and did a little analysis, summarized here:
[https://i.imgur.com/x6yQBQu.png](https://i.imgur.com/x6yQBQu.png).

As of that time, my mailbox was using 17GB (14GB of which are in one long-
running thread), and 900MB of that was email reply quotes. Google refuses to
provide an option to disable email quotes, which are completely useless in an
email thread of all gmail accounts.

I want my 900MB of free storage back, dammit!

Also, there's no way (AFAIK) to delete images attached to emails, while
keeping the messages.

------
zachruss92
I think the article forgets that Google is a business and they have an
intrinsic motivation to make money. IMHO Google provides a ton of software at
no charge to customers (I know, ads). Moving to a consumption-based pricing
model w/ a generous free tier means that only the users who use Google's
services the most end up paying for it.

Also, $20/yr for 100GB seems like a steal. I use G Suite even for my personal
email but even on my longest-standing account with almost a decade of history
I am only using 20GBs with the majority of that being photos.

------
6d6b73
The problem here is not that Google started charging people for their services

The problem here is not the question if Gmail is good or not.

The problem is that they subsidized their Gmail and other services in order to
get rid of small competitors and once they have a large market share, they
will make most of their services paid. It will take time, it will be slow but
it's going to happen.

And they use their large market share to keep all of the small independent
mail providers and self-hosted email servers in check by marking their emails
as spam.

~~~
svachalek
Yeah, this is basic capitalism but pretty scummy nonetheless. Having an email
address for a decade makes it incredibly difficult to change. The one "bright"
spot is actually that Gmail isn't very good; other than the massive pain
updating the world about your move there isn't much to lose.

------
wccrawford
When GMail started, they claimed that I'd never need to delete emails and I
could always just archive them. I knew that claim was too good to be true, but
I figured it'd be a long time before I really needed to worry about it.

Drive now exists and takes up more of that space, but I'm still comfortably
away from my limits.

I'm not upset about eventually having to pay for storage, but I was and am
upset about their claim that it would never be necessary.

~~~
decasteve
This has become the pattern. Buying into something on the basis of a value
proposition only to have it consistently changed from under you without any
recourse. It's a bait-and-switch and that's why it's upsetting.

It's perfectly reasonable to charge for these services and what they are
suggesting to charge -- if I were still a Google customer. But that's not how
it was sold to everyone. How many competitors did they drive out by taking
this approach and undercutting this way for so long?

~~~
Spooky23
That's unfair with respect to email.

I've had large corporate email environments in my portfolio for about half of
my career. As recently as 2017, ~2-3% of a 200k org of those users would
exceed the free GMail tier in terms of storage. I don't have the stats in
front of me, but I'd put money on 80% of the userbase being less than 10GB.

Big email users are always using email as a filing system. Calling GMail bait-
and-switch based on marketing claims made in a 2005 context is a pretty
extreme stance. My team at a big enteprise org provided folks with _50-100MB_
(similar to pre-GMail online offerings) in 2005.

Then Google offered a seemingly limitless service that is to this day
practically unlimited for all but the most active user.

------
magnetic
I've been pretty happy with the following setup:

I have a domain at namecheap, which forwards my address (say foo@bar.com) to
my gmail account. I use fetchmail from my home computer to bring the gmail
content to my local mail server (dovecot), which serves it out to me via
imaps.

That means there is usually very little sitting in gmail, and it can
accumulate there for a while when I have to do maintenance on my home OpenBSD
server (which is quite rare and doesn't last very long generally).

That means I can keep my email address "forever" (it'll always stay
foo@bar.com) but I can switch out of gmail anytime I want, as long as the
provider I switch to allows POP.

It also means I can take advantage of the spam filtering provided by gmail. I
also take advantage of the "advanced parsing" they perform on my mail, but my
default assumption is that anybody in the chain will be doing it anyways, so I
have no illusions that switching out of gmail will help prevent any data
mining.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
The problem with Gmail is that it lacks basic cleanup tools such as sorting by
size and you are forced to waste your time with tricks like larger:20mb.

~~~
ssully
The bigger problem with GMail is that the mobile app has no controls to manage
large amount of emails - not even a basic 'select all'. Which is hilarious,
because Inbox was so good because it was easy to manage most of your email on
your phone.

Now my Gmail is overflowing because it's too difficult to archive thing I
want, or delete what I don't in bulk. I actually have to log into the web
interface to do any kind of clean up, which is something I never had to do
with Inbox.

~~~
ridiculous_fish
It is possible to select more emails than are displayed; however operations
such as deletion on large selections always fail.

------
RocketSyntax
It's like $20 a yr for 100GB! It's an incredible deal.

------
rekoros
I paid. It’s OK - it’s an amazing service that changed my life. Even after
paying, I still can’t believe how cheap it is.

------
KoftaBob
They're not making us do anything. I'm getting so tired of low effort
clickbait garbage like this.

------
ghaff
I was noticing just the other day that my Gmail storage is creeping upward
towards its limit. I'm sure it could stand some cleaning out although I'm not
sure how much that will affect the storage used.

It's also harder if you've been in the Apple ecosystem for a while with
getting off with the free tier of storage.

I suspect a lot of us are going to end up paying various subscription fees for
storage on a number of services we use.

~~~
jvagner
I was surprised at how difficult it was to make "Delete" a top-level, default
UI option even in the latest iOS version of Mail.

It seemed interesting and novel when Gmail first launched and they encouraged
archiving everything, but all these years later, mail clients are still
engineered around this notion, even when they're not Gmail-only mail clients.

I like to delete emails, and for me, on iOS, that means I tend to use either
Outlook or Spark (between iPhone and iPad), or.. ironically, Gmail for iOS,
which allows for a one-swipe-action committed delete.

~~~
ghaff
I've gotten pretty lazy about deleting emails. But, the space aside, GBs of
random stuff do make it harder to search for older emails and docs, especially
if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for.

------
sairamkunala
the news site that the article was written on only gives access to 5 free
articles per month, its the same thing google has done.

------
bpodgursky
It will be healthy for both Google and the internet at large for Google to
have a revenue stream diversified from advertising.

If consumers feel that it is normal to pay small amounts of money for useful
web-based services, Google and other sites will have better and more
transparent opportunities to monetize.

~~~
ShteiLoups
So long as they don't continue to sell my data while also taking my money,
peace.

------
irrational
Every time I get near maxing out my drive space, I just take some time to
delete everything. If anything is really important I don't keep it in gmail or
google docs. That way I can just do a wipe of all my emails and files at any
time without worry.

------
satanspastaroll
The article seems to be gated to subscribers only. The filter is applied after
the article loads, so it may still be readable without executing javascript

E: that seems to only apply when using private mode, for whatever reason.

~~~
Centaurefox
You can also use outline : [https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/)

~~~
samfriedman
Outline has been failing on almost any site I care to read recently. It's
become far rarer to find an article that Outline works with, in my experience.

~~~
eddyg
Worked fine for me? [https://outline.com/j453CJ](https://outline.com/j453CJ)

------
digitalsushi
As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy to
start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the newer
gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google assistant
stuff available.

I tried to just make a new one and migrate, but there is not a reasonable way
I have found to migrate 10 gigabyte email accounts. With their rate limiting,
I end up with napkin math suggesting about 30 days to migrate, using someone
else's github scripts that do lots of error checking and restarting.

~~~
ValentineC
> _As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy
> to start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the
> newer gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google
> assistant stuff available._

Aren't you able to upgrade directly to G Suite Basic? (I myself have both
domains on legacy free Google Apps, and newer ones on paid G Suite.)

------
axaxs
Does Google offer a way to silo storage? I tried to email my wife last week,
and she claims to have never gotten it. Investigating, we noticed she hadn't
received an email in days. The culprit? Too many original size photos in
Google Photos. It seems completely bizarre to me that taking pictures with
incorrect settings can bring your email down. To Google's credit and my
relief, in fairness, once space was cleared the missing emails did come in.
Glad they didn't just start bouncing things!

------
heavymark
Glad to hear. Google is known for killing products right and left, Google
should charge for products people love and rely on to make sure its 100%
sustainable and won't go away.

------
FpUser
I do not use ANY cloud for my business/private accounts. I just host my main
and backup servers here and there with providers I can switch to / from in a
flick of a finger.

The only "cloud" I tolerate is buying stuff from the watching movies on
Netflix and shopping on Amazon and likes.

Of course when consulting and client demands it I work with the
Azure/Github/etc but that is the extent of my involvement. Anything that
happens on that front becomes a client problem. Not mine.

------
braindead_in
It is a good thing that Google is charging for it's products. They are
converting users from products to customers. I am looking forward to Google
Search Pro without any ads.

~~~
judge2020
Removing doubleclick ads is something i'm more interested in. Search ads
always seem to be contextual, never personalized. Sadly Google Contributor v1
failed
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor)

------
pbreit
When did Gmail's ever-increasing storage allotment thing end?

~~~
illnewsthat
From the article "It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in
2013 it stopped."

------
joshstrange
Ahh yes, the random-tweet-that-proves-my-point tactic... You can find a tweet
that "proves" your point for literally ANY issue. And, if you can't... just
create a fake twitter account and tweet it yourself. Readers aren't even
parsing the twitter account name so you don't even need to create a new
account for each new tweet you want to cite.

There are a lot of reasons to be mad at google, having to pay for storage is
not one of them.

------
pkamb
I began using a secondary Gmail account of mine as the Google Account tied to
a free-tier Google Photos upload from my phone.

Bad idea. It's a shared pool of storage resources, which was quickly filled up
by photos. Leaving Gmail with no storage. I suddenly was not getting any
emails to that account, with no notifications.

Seemed VERY vindictive to suddenly not deliver 75KB emails because I had
stored some photos.

------
nmeofthestate
I've hit this recently and have been trying to delete enough stuff to make
space - the google drive website is awful for doing this. So bad that I wonder
whether it's deliberate. I've got 14.8GB of data on there and can't work out
where it is.

On my computer, the sync'd Google Drive files come to less than one GB, so
it's not that.

~~~
judge2020
It doesn't show folders but clicking the text "14.8 of 15 GB used" or this
link[0] will take you to a list of the biggest files, at least in drive. You
can also go here[1] to see what services are using the most data.

0:
[https://drive.google.com/drive/quota](https://drive.google.com/drive/quota)

1: [https://one.google.com/storage](https://one.google.com/storage)

~~~
nmeofthestate
Thanks. I came back to add the same info, found by googling, that the storage
amount includes other Google services. (my space is mostly taken up by photos
+ gmail, because I've cleaned out google drive in an attempt to get the usage
down, not realising that it wasn't the issue. Looks like I'll be spending
hours painstakingly deleting photos and emails...

------
TheAdamist
Trying to pay google for anything is a not a good idea, any kind of problem
with the payment; your fault or not and they will lock you out of any google
services permanently with no support, recourse or escalation.

------
JoshMnem
Easy solutions: don't store photos and other files in your Google account
and/or download old mail by dragging it to a local folder in an email client
like Thunderbird.

------
porker
Can I delete attachments in GMail without deleting the email? Googling gives a
few potential ways involving the IMAP interface, but nothing straightforward.

------
maypeacepreva1l
I think every business is doing that. Apple with annoying storage full
messages which I had to cave in just last month and pay.

------
esalman
Is there a way to delete attachments (but not the associated emails) from
Gmail?

~~~
cr3ative
I believe you can do this by configuring an IMAP client and doing it there;
then it'll sync the result. Thunderbird, for example, is quite scriptable.

~~~
djsumdog
Their IMAP implementation is terribly broken. It will most likely just create
brand new messages and not delete the old ones. It's one of the many reason I
moved off gmail (to self hosting) in 2012. Another being domestic spying ..
which everyone has forgotten about apparently.

~~~
jannes
Can you clarify what you mean with domestic spying? Are you concerned about
other people in your household having access to your Gmail account?

~~~
DoctorOW
Domestic spying in this case is referring to the United States spying on its
own citizens.

~~~
lucb1e
Which doesn't actually matter if you're in the 96% of people that are not from
the USA.

This argument "but we don't spy on USA citizens so now we're all good and
ethical" doesn't make much sense to me. If a Dutch company allegedly spies on
foreign customers, it really wouldn't change my (Dutch) opinion about my
privacy at that company.

------
cocoa19
It would be nice to take your email address to another provider, the same way
it happens for cellphone numbers.

This could be email 2.0... First rule: 1)Do not require host name in the field
name. johndoe@gmail.com becomes johndoe.

~~~
me_me_me
So who owns the username?

Who runs the domain?

The beauty of email as protocol is that its independent. Nothing is stopping
you from running you @cocoa19.com (given its non-occupied already).

~~~
cocoa19
Who owns the telephone number? Same concept.

If I don't want Google to run my email, I just switch providers, let's say
protonmail or fastmail, etc. But I don't have to give a new address to all my
acquaintances.

~~~
me_me_me
Government owns the prefix that is rented to businesses who wants to start
their phone company (well at least in Europe).

Also the prefix in the phone number is exactly like a domain.

Even if there were no prefixes, one way or another you need a governing body
that ensures no clashes occur and has power to decide on disputes. So no two
companies try to assign same number to two different customers.

------
peterwwillis
Is there a non-javascript version of this page?

------
s_Hogg
How easy is it to migrate these days?

~~~
martin_a
Migrations always are somewhat "complicated". But cost-wise, I'm running my
own domain with mail and a NextCloud instance for 3,99 € per month. Probably
could get all of that even cheaper, but I like that webhoster. I recently
switched my Contact from Google to NextCloud/CalDav, too, so I got rid of that
tie, too.

------
NoblePublius
Omg 99 cents a month for 50GB I’m outraged

------
readhn
Google is one of the most brilliant businesses out there - they got everyone's
data for free! now they are making people pay for it too, literally!

------
im3w1l
Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into
monetization mode? A sign of slowing growth and increased payout to
shareholders to come?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into
> monetization mode?

No, that happened when they started selling ads.

