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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I assume you're talking about the free consumer tier?

Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.

Google shuts down free accounts when it believes they're being used for fraud/spam. And because scammers and spammers create them at virtually zero cost, and will fake activity to build account credibility until using them for nefarious purposes, that does mean legitimate free accounts occasionally get caught.

Regular backups are important no matter what though. Obviously Takeout exists, but there are lots of third-party automated backup solutions as well that will automatically convert Sheets files to .xlsx as part of the backup process. I use one that backs up nightly to my NAS.

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> Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.

Last I was a workspace Admin, you had to login to get the phone number and the code to dial once you called.

It certainly did get you to a human. Unfortunately, they were not empowered to actually help with any of the things I needed help with, even when it would just be filing a enhancement request with the product team (they just tell you to post in the unmonitored product forum)

I've seen several believable tales of Kafkaesque billing issues leading to Workspace accounts being suspended. It took months to get them to do invoice billing.

>You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.

I don't believe this after decades of past experience with them trying to find any human to contact. Have you seen the phone number yourself? Normally they just give you the runaround trying to navigate a maze of support pages.

> Have you seen the phone number yourself?

Yes. Do you have a paid account? It's in the Google Admin console. It gives you a PIN to enter when you call.

The worst customer support experiences of my life have been from Google, both while using Google Fi personally and GCP while working at Replit in its early days. Thankfully I'm no longer using either of those products now.

Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts. Google even occasionally burns developers they have deals and working relationships with.

Just don't use any Google services. Not free, not paid (why would you send them money???!?!). Not for personal stuff, not for work projects. Not for throwaway data, not for important data.

The Google rage on HN is immature.

That's a feature of any SaaS. Adobe frequently shuts down ETLA customers due their own invoice processing failures. I can think of three significant government subdivisions that were unable to access any M365 service for 1-10 days as a result of a reseller change.

The real lesson here is that you need to understand the failure domains of the technology your business depends on. Your business is as good as the contracts you rely on. We're relatively good at preparing for IT failure, but not so much the other stuff. For small businesses, key revenue generation could be stopped by an employee doing something dumb with a corporate card.

The real lesson here is that almost all modern SaaS applications have massively under invested in customer support in order to appear more profitable or sustainable than they really are. One of the major factors behind LLM development is trying to solve this problem before the house of cards falls down. Companies were enticed by the recurring revenue of SaaS, but don't want to pay for the level of support required when you are responsible for all your customers data as well as their access to the service.

Why would a government division (or any 20-person office) pay a reseller?

Because government purchases go through the procurement office which is using an authorized reseller under a larger government contract.

Resellers handle a bunch of compliance paperwork necessary for the government, and are also contracted for migration and support needs.

> Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts

None substantiating the "most AI-kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access" upthread though. I mean, I don't know what you're citing specifically, but yes, obviously: business relationships like everything else get tangled up sometimes. People's electricity gets shut off incorrectly, people's Doordash orders arrive with the wrong stuff, phone bills arrive without the promised discounts; everything sucks, kinda.

But if you're paying the solution is to call your support contact and have them sort it out. And that works at Google the same way it does everywhere else.

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