> 7 bucks a month is hardly ransom.

You do not know other peoples' situations. And strictly speaking, demanding money to access your data is ransom.

> it would be better than automatically making private repo's public when you stop paying

False equivalency. I already said that "disabling repo and allowing primary user to download" was acceptable. I said nothing about private->public.

This whole situation only reaffirms my distrust in all cloud services.

EDIT: Seriously, -1 ? The user's data is sacrosanct. You disable most functionality, but you never, I repeat never delete data or make it irretrievable within a envelope of time for recovery. The only exception to that is if the user explicitly requests a permanent deletion - then you do so after appropriate warnings.