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They way I look at it, Google treats support in the same way that Amazon treats APIs.

In that they know they're making a choice with consequences and pain. But they see the strategic value of that choice (never running a support org) as outweighing the tactical pain.

Additionally, I'd guess the internal opinion is "If users need support, then something is broken and we should just fix it."

Where I think this falls down, which Microsoft learned 30 years ago, is that:

(a) Unless you're asking, you're not going to surface visibility of broken things. Users will just find a way to deal, while being pissed off. And then some product team finds out there's been a major issue for the last 5 years.

(b) Unless you're actively soliciting feedback from your customers and users, you're at high risk of building the wrong thing. We see this with enterprise GCP frequently. "Oh, you need Y feature? We never thought about that, because {insert internal way that Google does things, but no one else does}."

If Google knows they're not legally compelled to provide support they just don't. That's why their support can scale to Play Store's 2 billion users but not Gmails.

If the EU ever gets around to forcing Google to support their users regardless of how they are enriching Google the moral of the story will be they saved billions by waiting until litigation. Just like taxes.

What support do you get for free apps in Play Store?

Phone and email - the apps might be free but they still had to purchase a Google-powered device to get free apps.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7299936

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7100415?hl=en

That is why seeing them loose the cloud war feels so good! Yeah, apparently there are developers outside of Google having opinions and making decisions!

> I wouldn't expect any free service that involves a paid employee from any service I don't pay for (with money, not privacy).

I expected at least one response suggesting this. I, and many others would consider email access my absolute most critical asset, it's also extremely difficult to switch providers. It's not like your real estate goes 'nope sorry you can't prove yourself, we can't replace your lost keys without validation, sorry, go buy new stuff and live somewhere else' - I imagine that would be illegal in many countries even if the place was rent free.

I understand that Google support, if it existed, would be inundated with bad tickets. However, I don't imagine having a skeleton set of support staff and a support workflow that requires users to climb mountains to communicate with a human would really impact on googles bottom line. It would have stopped me venting in various places about the issue, and might end up losing potential sales when I/others push our employers to use $not_google because their support sucks.

> I, and many others would consider email access my absolute most critical asset

So why not pay for it?

I did. I paid $240/year for Google One, which claimed to have support for consumer accounts. It was nice to have that peace of mind.

But then when I actually needed supoort, they couldn't do anything but read forum posts to me. They were not empowered to escalate to actually resolve anything more complicated than "where's the button for X".

Even if you pay, Google still treats their users like shit.

This isn't even a service request, it's a bug report.

Are you able to name a reputable email provider which isn't >$60/year or self-managed? My 65 year old mother probably wouldn't be interested in either of those two, but would be willing to pay for per-use support lines for the one time in 13 years which rendered her account inaccessible.

And lets not forget my father, who couldn't access his _paid_ Telstra/O365 standard-user work email. When I called the Telstra support line they gave me administrative access to the entire instance, no proof of ID necessary (I literally said I'm not associated with the company and calling on behalf of my father).

To be honest, I'm not sure which is worse now that I think about it.

$60/year doesn't seem terrible for your absolute most critical asset.

It isn't, but $60 per year for a service you've been getting for years is perfectly fine, until it isn't. And then you realise the value of the dollars spent, but not before.

But yeah, I mostly agree with you. Paid single-use support would be an absolutely transformational addition to the likes of the free Google services, I think. Why doesn't it exist?

Most likely because the cost of a single complicated support call (of the sort that can't be answered from a knowledge base) that may need to be escalated to 2nd level support or beyond would appear exorbitant ($100 perhaps, or more?).

Paying per incident is a terrible moral hazard.

Dotster was similar for DNS hosting, several years ago.

Called them to get access to our account after a problem, and they gave me admin with no verification at all. Just provided the account name, was asked for new password. Like... WTF?

Tried telling their security people, who then denied it happened, let alone it being a problem.

Our DNS hosting was moved away from Dotster shortly afterwards.

My dog license costs $35/yr and the only benefit is the county might help me recover my dog if I lose her, which happened once in 13 years.

My laptop has a warranty that costs $60 year and I get nothing, nothing!, unless I break it. And don't even get me started on my car insurance!

Wasn't it Mark Twain who said insurance is "Betting the other man that your house will burn down, and hoping he wins"

Fastmail.

> So why not pay for it?

Let's turn this around. Why is Google offering a free service that doesn't meet reasonable expectations for how that service works?

My repeated experience is that Google is good at things like search, where people get what they get and individual humans don't matter to the company. But they're bad at things that require treating people like people.

After being a happy Google hardware customer for years, I just had a purchasing experience that was so bad that I'll never buy from Google again. Their hardware and software won me as a customer; their customer service not only lost me, but was so bad it has made me more wary of doing business at all with any part of Google.

For me, this is in the "do or do not, there is no try" bucket. They don't really want to deal with humans, so they half-ass it. I wish they'd just stay out of those kinds of businesses, as their dominance and indifference to profit can mean crushing competitors and preventing the emergence of a real marketplace.

What company offers white glove support for nonpaying customers?

You seem to be missing the point. I'm saying that if Google can't deliver a service well, maybe they should not offer the service. Which is what most companies do.

You get pretty decent support if you have Google One. My wife had an issue, clicked the support thing and was talking to somebody in a few minutes.

You get decent response.

There is someone on the line and follow-up emails too.

But actually fixing things is a crap-shoot.

I've had an issue with Google One family accounts for a month now.

I can not invite anyone into my family, so far no solution. Instead they keep throwing free storage at various family members because they can not escalate very much.

$20 / yr?

Even if I'm not using any of the other features, that seems like the cheapest support plan ever.

They say "Google experts"... so who staffed the phones? Are we talking actual customer support who are empowered to run playbooks and cut tickets, or what?

In my experience, they are able to connect you with people who should be able to resolve your problem. Sort of like sending you directly to an operator. I was able to solve a problem with my YouTube Premium/Google Music subscription using it in about 20 minutes. My problem was I have an account from beta Google Music that has been grandfathered for years and I lost YouTube ad free when they recently restricted it. They forwarded me to someone at YouTube who actually was able to resolve it.

"but I wouldn't expect any free service that involves a paid employee from any service I don't pay for (with money, not privacy)."

It's not a free service. It's a surveillance company that spies on, profiles, and sells out its users for a profit in exchange for the services it offers. Most surveillance companies with email offerings have support. If Google doesn't, then it's taking something in exchange for nothing on top of doing less than the standard most of its competitors set in this area. It will also probably keep making revenue on the locked account for a little while despite its owner having no access.

Way different ethically or professionally than a situation where the user was getting free email with the other party getting absolutely nothing in return. Something truly free.