I pay for ad-free YouTube. I also pay for a ton of extra storage in Google drive.
I find the constantly closing down and shifting of services to be a slight annoyance but not really too impactful in my personal usage. For example, moving Google podcasts and YouTube music into YouTube has been a pretty sad degradation. But not really a deal breaker for me.
What I would never ever do is build a business on top of Google. They seem so cavalier about pulling the rug out from under you. I can only imagine if you have for example services running in Google cloud, how they would treat you if you were counting on a service that they thought wasn't worth it to maintain anymore. Shutting down apis that people were using like this just seems very on-brand for them to me.
I would argue that there are good business to be built on top of AWS and Azure catering to the users of those services, and very little chance that Amazon or Microsoft would pull the rug out from under you based on their track records.
I'm unhappy that I'm paying for Gsuite (or whatever it is called these days). I don't think there is a way to downgrade your account tied to your own domain to a free google account? If there is, I'll def do that and. I already use Fastmail anyway but there are too many stuff tied to my Google account (logins, google drive data etc)
Google drive data is probably the easiest part to get out.
I found out it was much more annoying to do the same for google photos. My partner created a tons of albums and last time I had a look at the google export you'd have to build your own parser to scrap the metadata and rebuild the albums locally. I wonder if someone already build this.
This is useful thanks although the goal of this tool is to put all photos in chronologically ordered folders. It doesn't seem to yet be able to recreate albums either by using folders and symlinks or (preferrably) adding tags in the exif metadata.
For me it is to store encrypted backups of TBs of data on Google Drive. Simply because its the cheapest option (although its slow AF). I'd like to switch to something else if either the competition lowers prices or I make more monies :P
In my case, out of nostalgia for the Google of old. I paid for a Pixel phone and was very unimpressed with the experience, so much so that after a lifetime on Android I went and bought a brand new iDevice. Oddly enough I found Google Fit to be a nice app to use, fairly straightforward and without too much crud. Oh well, off to the Goog Graveyard it goes!
More like their time and energy. Provisionally free, but not worth it in the end. Arguably Google not charging actual end users for services up front is the root of this problem.
Most people have better things to do with their time than maintain mental lists of which technology companies have better and worse track records for product maintenance and support.
