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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

If your business relies on it, whatever "it" is, then you probably need to pay for it, so that if it has some serious problem, you can call up a human and either beg or yell at them to fix it, depending on the situation.

I've always thought it madness to even rely on gmail for a business, who can cancel you whenever.

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The problem is if you pay Google for "it," you're still treated as a statistic, same as the non-paying customers. It's deep in the corporate DNA. Google Workspace isn't free, and neither is the rest of GCP.

I've had multi-million dollar engagements with Google, and you're just as vulnerable to this stuff as the free ones. I've had things escalated through one of Eric Schmidt's direct reports, and I was still vulnerable.

And as a footnote, I do subscribe to Google One on my soon-to-be-terminated Workspace account. I'm not sure why Google is terminating a service I paid for.

If you pay Google, you can talk to human beings, perhaps, but they're no more empowered to solve your problem than their web pages.

Microsoft and Amazon have always provided real support. Things get escalated to engineers who fix things if need be. Things also don't get whack-a-moled for no reason; they're aware that bankrupting my business isn't good for their business, even if the short-term ROI on sustaining a legacy API or something is negative.

Oh right. I suppose "paying for it" is necessary, not sufficient. I wouldn't know; I've paid a much smaller company for all my services and such, though they're not super office-y; but website and email related things.

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