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Comment by pg_is_a_butt | Hacker News Reader

Not true... you just have to pay for it. I worked for A fortune 100 company that was moving some things to Google App Engine, and paid for the highest level of support. We had a list of guys we could get on the phone whenever we needed, including the main guy in charge of everything.

I helped them fix a lot of bugs and broken processes, but I'm better than most at making reports. If they had to deal with bad developers blaming Google for problems that had nothing to do with Google, that would waste a lot of time. But on the other hand, if we didn't pay for support, those problems probably never would have been fixed, and I don't think we were ever compensated or given discount support for helping.

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We pay for the highest level of support on Google Cloud and it isn't worth shit. I'd say it actually provides negative usefulness, as usually their support folks just waste our time and not do anything.

The only place I've gotten actual support from Google was with Ads and my company at the time was spending 9 figures.

To the rude as hell tone of the reply beneath this: The GKE control plane failed. There's no quality improvement that I could have made on a bug report about their shit being broken.

> Google support is non-existent.

> Not true... you just have to pay for it. I worked for A fortune 100 company

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that there only about 100 companies who can afford Fortune 100-ish level support..............................................

I don't see "Fortune 100-level support" listed on Google's website. How do I purchase it?

Presumably, by spending enough money to get an account manager, then asking them to sell you a support contract.

Account manager and support contract are sold together... $150,000/yr paid up front + 4% of yearly spend.

Seems insanely high, especially compared to the next step down which is only $250/mo per user... you could get by with a separate account with a single master user that controlled all the deployments and billing and only pay $3,000/yr. What you get for that extra $147,000+/year is that you talk directly with the lowest level engineer actually working on the problem rather than relaying messages that lose context... but you'll still need to know what you're talking about and be able to actually help the engineer rather than spin them in circles, or you'll be kept at bay.

https://cloud.google.com/support says the highest plan promises 15-min response and a dedicated account manager.

For consumers, https://one.google.com/about/support is the way to pay for the support, since they claim "Cross-Google" support. I haven't used Google One support (even though I am a member as I have a subscription to their storage plan), so I don't know how good it is though, and it's not super clear how "cross" it really is. https://one.google.com/support says 2-3 min response for phone/chat though.

Last time I filed one of those P1 tickets, it was assigned to someone immediately but we didn't get any useful help from the support people for 7 hours.

It took multiple escalations to people responsible for the specific service and the issue was entirely Google's service having an error. Meanwhile production was hard-down that whole time.

What happens to my Google One plan if my account is banned for a TOS violation?

I don't know - I'm just a Google user, and I haven't gotten my account banned. I presume it won't work ?

So the reason I would want guaranteed human support from Google is in the event they mistakenly ban my account of 13 years. If it also bans me from the support product then it’s completely pointless.

I think many here are missing the real problem: Why should customers have to pay for support to fix problems on Google’s end?

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