Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.
And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
Doing a bait-and-switch on a percentage of your paying customers, no matter how small the percentage is, may be "viable" for the company, but it's a hostile experience for those users, and companies deserve to be called out for it.
Pricing tiers suck if your usage needs are at the bottom of a tier, or you need exactly one premium feature but not more. A la carte pricing is always at least a bit steep, since there's no minimum charge/bulk discount (consider a gym or museum's "day pass") so they have to charge you the full one-time costs every time in case that's your only time.
Base cost + extra per usage might be the best overall, but because nobody has solved micro transactions, the usage fees have to be pretty steep too. And frankly, everyone hates being metered - it means you have to think about pricing every time you go to use something.
Once growth slows, churn eats much of the organic growth and you need to spend money on marketing.
Hadn't even considered your obvious point, a good one!
I had to give up and delete plenty of data because of this. That data was important to me, but not important enough to pay their ransom.
Although I will say it's been nice to have them give more transparency around their actual soft cap numbers.
Storage was already a hairy beast with the original setup, and it would be much better if they had defined limits you could at least know about (and pay for).
And there speaks marketing.
...even nearly any frame of reference for anything storage related, much less gigabytes
The real issue is that everyone scrambles to make a sale, and nobody stops to determine if they should actually make that sale. Funny enough, I blame all of this on marketing and sales.
Force businesses to only sell to qualified buyers and make it incredibly easy for businesses to qualify buyers at the lowest possible cost. The end result in my fantasy world is that a business ends up with some document, some self attestation, that they've educated the customer. The benefit that actually matters much more than the attestation no one should ever see would be the educated customer.
Clearly, this is way too much just for a little storage.
But I also would be curious to know if there's another customer qualification concept like this. (And I just thought of one. Scuba diving! Customer pays to learn, otherwise you're in deep (reputational) doodoo when they drown.)
So… Marketing has taken over, just as parent comment said. Got it.