Based on the number of hacker news posts from people who pay them money and are locked out of their accounts by automated systems with no recourse I'd say that's utterly false.

Maybe you meant to say "if you pay them enough money" which is true. But most people don't have that much money to pay them.

Doubt. We're paying ~$10k/month on ads. The Ads API is rate limited, but it's either broken or has arcane logic, so about every 4-6 weeks, the usual workload will trigger it and we're shut out for 12-24 hours. Can talk to ad support whenever I want, but all they are good for is optimizing campaigns and explaining the UI. No option to get to technical support, no option for ads support to escalate.

Of course, we might not be a large enough customer, but it certainly isn't about "paying".

I may not be giving them money directly, but my use of their products contributes to their billions in ad revenue. Without us free users providing eyeballs for their ad network they would be significantly less rich.

It's upsetting that the default response to complaints about Google's terrible customer service is "if you don't pay them you aren't a customer." Most of their value comes from us, it most certainly isn't a one-way relationship.