Move me to the paid version, don't charge me, and then change me 50 bucks every time I need to open up a support case.
But for 50 bucks, I had better be able to get an actual person on the telephone ;-)
It's may not be about supporting you as a user,but about supporting the feature of a free-tier of features whose users are >99.9% paying customers. I imagine having to pepper "is_billable() && !is_grandfathered()" everywhere gets old, and leads to some subtle bugs/test failures for a feature that's used by 0.03% (a guess) of users, who also happen to be non-paying.
Additionally, at Google's scale, systems interact with each other in non-trivial ways. As a hypothetical, if the CEO/director decrees that all teams should use G-Pay's code & internal infrastructure for all payments (for compliance reasons) by 2023, that may necessitate code & schema changes that do not work with "(mostly) billable customers" because grandfathered accounts may not have a billing method available (which G-Pay systems require); the G-Pay team can't add support for the "billable-customer-but-not-really" feature until the second half of 2024, unless the Workspaces team can just removing an item from the 2022 G-Pay roadmap that's projected to bring in an additional $200M revenue p.a.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Googler, I'm speculating based on my experience in large organizations with intricate cross-dependencies. The Workspace engineers may empathize with you, but their hands are tied,and they can't publicly share the trade-offs that are being made, which is unfortunate.
They probably forgot what they wrote in their blog post
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...
"Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)."
Yes, they can claim they are no longer providing the service, but that's difficult to argue when they are providing a functionally identical service that is just a billing change to cause a "migration".
I design and sell software, telling me that Google "doesn't have the resources" to solve this, holds about as much water as a colander.
They could have just moved us up to the starter tier and given us a large enough pricing credit that the billing system will never charge me.
They could - but that's still work, and who will go to bat for this when there is other revenue-generating work to be done? "I kept non-paying-users from having to pay" isn't exactly promotion-packet material.
I commiserate with you - I too have a grandfathered domain (or 2), but 10+ years of ad-free services (email, Docs, GCloud, etc) for free in exchange for being Guinea pigs for a bit is a fantastic deal. Our utility as early-adopters was valuable at the start - now we're a disposable inconvenience. A vanishingly small number of "Free for life" deals are honored for life.
Edit:
> I design and sell software, telling me that Google "doesn't have the resources" to solve this, holds about as much water as a colander.
You misunderstand me: Google has the resources move every single paying customer to the free tier - if they choose to, but that is unlikely. They are equally unlikely to do replace revenue-generating work with something that doesn't move the needle: it's a question of motivation, not resources. For the software you design and sell, would you prioritize a feature only used by someone you donated your software to over your paying customers?
