Google is also unlikely to kill Gmail because Gmail is the incentive for users to be signed into a Google Account, which allows them to target ads to you. That's a critical anchor.
Google could at a future date make these a paid offering to boost earnings. There is no guarantee googles consumer services remain free long term
IIRC a couple of things were limited. I ran into a few.
- Reduced Google Voice/Meet Calling options. - No TLS rules for mail.
You are thinking about marginal costs. Even if there is no marginal cost for a "free" priced tier, that doesn't mean the operating costs of the tier go away and that the tier isn't likely losing money. We don't have transparent data on how much in terms of operating costs Google was eating for these grandfathered in free accounts, but it doesn't take a lot to imagine there were some operating costs that Google was possibly eating for some time now. I would imagine they ran they ran some sort of analysis on the pros/cons of goodwill/marketing versus operating costs and a price raise made sense.
I am not sure if google will end up terminating free personal gmail eventually or not. But I don't take terminating the free workspaces some years ago, or terminating the grandfathered-in legacy leftover free workspaces more recently--as any kind of a signal for it.
They're getting all that data from your e-mail and can chew it up and sell it back to other businesses (apparently they don't use it to target ads at you any more, but you can be certain they're still harvesting data).
I'm fairly sure collecting all that data is core to their business model and they'd never make it paid.
I could go on and on for what I'd consider a great cleanup experience. It's surprising to me that such a thing doesn't exist, nor is it the kind of thing that's built into Gmail itself. You'd figure they would be best to offer a simple cleanup experience that has sane defaults.
If you are in the habit of exchanging a large amount of documents and pictures over email, a dedicated storage solution might be more appropriate.
Work-related communication, as in freelancing, might deserve a separate mailbox that is kept clean of unimportant things.
Online sellers email me that order #2748747284933938 has had its status updated. Click link and yippee, it’s gone from order received to processing. That’s the email. Thanks.
It’s really annoying and turns me off using those products.
I mean, I click < 1% of these kind of email links but I'm glad I get them on the off chance I do.
For some things, I’ve taken to copying the page of my purchase and replying to myself in the inevitable “thanks for your order” (and zero details of it in the email).
God help you if you have multiple people (spouse, kids) using your Amazon or whatever account.
My personal email is almost entirely read-only, and nearly all its utility is letting computers, not people, send me messages that I'm expecting.