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Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be ha

Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it). Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free shit" product model for two reasons— [1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it's more likely to be killed if it doesn't get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company. [2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.

wolco2 6y ago
I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch. If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in. In a year they will start charging for gmail. In two or three they will start charging for search.
- andybak 6y ago
  I’m not sure you’ve thought through all these examples to the same degree.
- cogburnd02 6y ago
  If they start charging for search then 1/3 of Earth will use Baidu, 1/3 DuckDuckGo, and 1/3 Bing.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    aka "1/3 will use Baidu and 2/3 will use Bing"
  - vkou 6y ago
    But what about Yandex?
- mrlala 6y ago
  >In two or three they will start charging for search I would say you win for the most moronic thing uttered on the internet today.. but then there are other things going on right now which actually do beat you. Don't worry, I'm sure you will win another day.
  - gcatalfamo 6y ago
    Woooosh
  - dang 6y ago
    Hey, you've been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately, unfortunately. We've had to warn you about this multiple times in the past, too. This is the sort of thing we ban accounts for, and I don't want to ban you, so would you please review the rules and stick to them from now on? They are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
- glennpratt 6y ago
  > If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in. They do. Photos uploaded before the change next year do not count.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Exactly. There's zero bait and switch here, especially when Takeout makes it so easy to export all your photos anyways.
    - nolok 6y ago
      You don't even need takeout, you can make your Photos folder appear in your Drive
      - jdofaz 6y ago
        They got rid of that
  - echelon 6y ago
    For now
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Unfortunately there is no thing in the world that is proof from change, especially things you aren't paying for. If you have a problem with it you can use any of the other free photo upload services that will accept 15GB+ of your photos and will guarantee that free service for life.
      - echelon 6y ago
        I don't have a problem with it. This is a good thing for the industry that Google can't continue to offer unrealistic and unsustainable products for free. They set expectations that were hard to meet. I think this serves as a warning and reminder to users.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Digital rent control is a terrible idea.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  > In two or three they will start charging for search I would pay for this now if as a result google started respecting privacy.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    That would țruly be an awesome offer. I'm not sure that I would take it (stingy should be my middle name) but offering it would be a very respectful gesture by Google. Follow up question: would we trust that paying changed anything?
- mdoms 6y ago
  > In a year they will start charging for gmail. > In two or three they will start charging for search. Great! They should.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    They will still comb through your gmail/google docs for ad related data to serve up to you and enlarge you customer profile. Please don't be under any illusion that won't continue. They're just adding a price to extract even more money from you, not just as data source, but now as a paying customer + data source for advertisers.
- byte1918 6y ago
  > I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch. Wouldn't it be 'bait and switch' if they did that after less time, say 1 year? 10 years is more than reasonable. And if you disagree, that's fine, but I'm curious to hear what number of years would you consider reasonable then? I'm not excited about the news either but I think it's _fair_.
  - somethingwitty1 6y ago
    I'm not sure more time makes it better. The logic here is that they baited you for so long that it suddenly became fair? Apply that logic to other situations and it doesn't make sense. I get that `you` may be ok with this, but it doesn't change what it is. Regardless of whether we individually feel what is happening is 'fair', we should be able to acknowledge why someone is upset and that this is indeed a bait & switch. Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation, while competitors to it went out of business, and now, they are forced to pay for continued service. That is a bait & switch. The moment we have to start saying, "well, they should have known better" or "how did you expect this to be free forever" puts us into victim blaming territory. Just because someone could have been aware of a bait & switch/scam, doesn't make that practice not a bait & switch/scam.
    - therealx 6y ago
      It also means the market is opening back up. The code of projects gone by still exists, and it's not the worlds biggest effort to make a photo app.
    - byte1918 6y ago
      > Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation 'unlimited backup and storage of the photos' was the market pitch, whether people read the TOS is another thing. I can see why some people would feel unhappy with this and I can't blame anyone for that but on the other hand I wish we would stop taking these vague market statements at face value. 'free', 'unlimited' and 'forever' can never go together in a capitalist market. And I'll abruptly stop here because I would derail into things like law and ethics which, I think, are out of my scope. > while competitors to it went out of business This is honestly a tragedy that happens all across the industry at the moment.
- kartayyar 6y ago
  What is the bait and switch ? The stuff you uploaded already is still free. It's for more usage. You don't like it, you have the option to take your photos somewhere else.
  - acdha 6y ago
    People don’t join a service like this intending it to be a static archive. They were told that this was an easy way to automatically save space on your phone and protect your photos in case something happens to your phone, started building a social network with their friends and family, etc. Now the choice is to pay or walk away.
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      I fail to see what's wrong with either of those options. Switching photos apps is not hard.
      - fernandotakai 6y ago
        and you can easily download all your google photos. (source: i did it)
      - acdha 6y ago
        It’s not hard if you have a computer in addition to a phone, enough storage to hold a full local copy, and don’t mind spending time getting all of your friends and family to switch.
ehsankia 6y ago
Not only that, but a product that is financially self-sustaining is much less likely to get killed. The majority of products Google kills are the ones that doesn't get traction and run at a loss. If you want Photos to have a future, you'd be happy that it's trying to be cash positive.
murgindrag 6y ago
I'd be more than happy to pay for a privacy-respecting product like Google Photos. I'm not happy to pay to be the product, or to have something I rely on swept out from under me.
- therealx 6y ago
  Nextcloud's isn't bad.
  - murgindrag 6y ago
    I tried Nextcloud a long time ago. It was buggy. I really, really wanted to pay for it at the time, but it didn't quite work. Should I try it again? I also might be confused, but I thought they kept some key parts proprietary. I'm now looking, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps something changed (perhaps even my memory!). I'm a lot more happy to pay for 100% open-source than 90% open-source. Is it fully open-source? I'd love to pay for a reliable, hosted, open-source solution.
    - therealx 6y ago
      It's a lot better now. You should read on the history of owncloud/nextcloud to answer your proprietary questions, but the short verison is: nextcloud is open as can be and in really good shape. It will most likely never be quite as magic as Google Photos, but it's close enough to not miss GPhotos. Email me if you want to keep chatting about it or if you want to get a login to my intance to check it out :)
echelon 6y ago
I'm actually glad to see this. Unlimited storage is unsustainable. I don't like seeing things tied to advertising revenue. It's not comfortable from a privacy perspective, and it's certainly not competitive for other players wanting to enter the space without the dollars from Google's huge advertising funnel/marketplace/ecosystem. You'll notice Google also started to clamp down on Gmail trash storage space, and I'll bet they're going to place more limits on Drive and unused accounts. I wonder if this is antitrust driven? Or are they hurting for space? We haven't seen this crop up on Youtube, where I bet they're really parched for disk space. Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?
- ZainRiz 6y ago
  Seems like hard drives aren't getting cheaper by that much of a margin nowadays [0] Combine this with growing usage, this might make their projected costs much higher than expected [0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Technology finds a way...
    - karmasimida 6y ago
      Technology has limits
- harha 6y ago
  Possibly, but given its google I wouldn’t assume it’s more (or less) respecting of user privacy just because it costs something. For the business products there may be strong business rationale behind it (it would categorically rule out too many applications), but for a consumer product I doubt that they don’t try making money both ways.
- stev0lution 6y ago
  > Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed? Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago: > Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes > YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 for discussion)
rbecker 6y ago
> Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. Anger could be due to: 1) Kill competition by offering product at a loss. 2) Once competition is dead and people are invested in the product and ecosystem, start charging.
- usrusr 6y ago
  And "competition" in this case isn't just other photo cloud service companies, it's also the entire habit and ability of offline bulk data handling. Having opted for a smartphone without microSD because storage was low priority, having favored the ISP when it was time to decide between spending money on more bandwidth and spending money on an NAS, these things. People have become addicted not only on the mental level.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
GuardianCaveman 6y ago
-“ Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).” The level of snark in your comment is really unnecessary. There are many valid points in the comments on why we are upset but you’d rather just straw man us instead of acknowledging thosey or even leave the snark out and make your case.
kartayyar 6y ago
It also means they will hopefully clamp down on worse monetization features like sending you notifications to go buy a photo book. Charge me for it and then just focus on making the best product. I like this change a lot.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dontfiremepls 6y ago
Because it's anti-competitive dumping. The dirty secret of SV is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: burn billions of dollars of money to offer 'free' or goods and services, gain a dominant position in the market by driving the honestly priced competition into the ground, then jack up the prices and fleece the customers. Uber is the poster boy of this strategy, but it's not the only one. The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0) possibly at a loss, or shut it down and offer a one-click migrate-my-data button and empower customers to shop around for the price / quality tradeoff they are willing to pay for. Of course, that will never happen, because antitrust in this country is toothless, paid for by the exact same corporations that engage in anti-competitive behavior.
- nybble41 6y ago
  > The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0)… This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in. Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.
  - dontfiremepls 6y ago
    We are going to lawyer this, aren't we? The service was promised for free, not per photo storage. The expectation is that the service will continue to be free. From what you're saying, (most of) the future use of the service, which consists of uploading and storing new photos, will be charged. Velvet gloves dumping.
    - nybble41 6y ago
      > The service was promised for free… Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.
havetocharge 6y ago
There's a lot of anger just because 'Google'. Whatever reasons provided that would not be appropriate for others will seem okay when applied to Google.
dwd 6y ago
You always pay for using Google products. When it's in their interest to make it free - to drive usage or gather data to train AI, you pay with your data. Once that data is no longer of any value they then make you pay with cash. Google Maps API, soon reCaptcha are other products that started out free. Ever tried a search you may have done 5,10 years ago? Good luck finding obscure old stuff in Google's index even if it still exists - they just don't keep everything forever once it can't have advertising put against it.
bassman9000 6y ago
Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. It's getting tiresome to see multibillion revenue, tax offshoring companies backtracking on their customer promises. FTA: As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
animeshjain 6y ago
I agree, and would like to pay Google (would have already done so earlier), BUT, there is this gaping trust gap. I find it hard to trust that my account won't one day be randomly banned with no option to communicate with a human customer support agent. Based on a cursory search, these bans are not so uncommon, and it is just scary [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057365 [4] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5016170?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5016170?hl=en (edit for formatting)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- glenstein 6y ago
  Right, this is the problem. I'm sure many of us would be happy to pay for someone to handle comprehensive photo storage the way Google Photos does. But Google can shut you out forever at any point without a warning, and it probably still is data-harvesting to bolster its services even with a paid version.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  This is a completely legit reason to not trust Google with your data, but won't it apply even more when the service is free?
perryizgr8 6y ago
Problem is that google will probably still kill it even when people are paying.
0goel0 6y ago
Like news
wolfgke 6y ago
> This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it). Google still collects data.
richrichardsson 6y ago
I am already paying for Google Drive, and a huge part of what sold me on paying for it was that Google offered free photo storage if I was happy with a potential slight quality degradation.
vaccinator 6y ago
I'd rather host my own rather then give my pictures to Google... They already have too much of my data. I use nextcloud.

wolco2 6y ago

I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch. If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in. In a year they will start charging for gmail. In two or three they will start charging for search.

andybak 6y ago
I’m not sure you’ve thought through all these examples to the same degree.
cogburnd02 6y ago
If they start charging for search then 1/3 of Earth will use Baidu, 1/3 DuckDuckGo, and 1/3 Bing.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  aka "1/3 will use Baidu and 2/3 will use Bing"
- vkou 6y ago
  But what about Yandex?
mrlala 6y ago
>In two or three they will start charging for search I would say you win for the most moronic thing uttered on the internet today.. but then there are other things going on right now which actually do beat you. Don't worry, I'm sure you will win another day.
- gcatalfamo 6y ago
  Woooosh
- dang 6y ago
  Hey, you've been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately, unfortunately. We've had to warn you about this multiple times in the past, too. This is the sort of thing we ban accounts for, and I don't want to ban you, so would you please review the rules and stick to them from now on? They are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
glennpratt 6y ago
> If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in. They do. Photos uploaded before the change next year do not count.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Exactly. There's zero bait and switch here, especially when Takeout makes it so easy to export all your photos anyways.
  - nolok 6y ago
    You don't even need takeout, you can make your Photos folder appear in your Drive
    - jdofaz 6y ago
      They got rid of that
- echelon 6y ago
  For now
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Unfortunately there is no thing in the world that is proof from change, especially things you aren't paying for. If you have a problem with it you can use any of the other free photo upload services that will accept 15GB+ of your photos and will guarantee that free service for life.
    - echelon 6y ago
      I don't have a problem with it. This is a good thing for the industry that Google can't continue to offer unrealistic and unsustainable products for free. They set expectations that were hard to meet. I think this serves as a warning and reminder to users.
andromeduck 6y ago
Digital rent control is a terrible idea.
Skunkleton 6y ago
> In two or three they will start charging for search I would pay for this now if as a result google started respecting privacy.
- usrusr 6y ago
  That would țruly be an awesome offer. I'm not sure that I would take it (stingy should be my middle name) but offering it would be a very respectful gesture by Google. Follow up question: would we trust that paying changed anything?
mdoms 6y ago
> In a year they will start charging for gmail. > In two or three they will start charging for search. Great! They should.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  They will still comb through your gmail/google docs for ad related data to serve up to you and enlarge you customer profile. Please don't be under any illusion that won't continue. They're just adding a price to extract even more money from you, not just as data source, but now as a paying customer + data source for advertisers.
byte1918 6y ago
> I think offering something for free and unlimited for 10 years and suddenly charging for it seems like bait and switch. Wouldn't it be 'bait and switch' if they did that after less time, say 1 year? 10 years is more than reasonable. And if you disagree, that's fine, but I'm curious to hear what number of years would you consider reasonable then? I'm not excited about the news either but I think it's _fair_.
- somethingwitty1 6y ago
  I'm not sure more time makes it better. The logic here is that they baited you for so long that it suddenly became fair? Apply that logic to other situations and it doesn't make sense. I get that `you` may be ok with this, but it doesn't change what it is. Regardless of whether we individually feel what is happening is 'fair', we should be able to acknowledge why someone is upset and that this is indeed a bait & switch. Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation, while competitors to it went out of business, and now, they are forced to pay for continued service. That is a bait & switch. The moment we have to start saying, "well, they should have known better" or "how did you expect this to be free forever" puts us into victim blaming territory. Just because someone could have been aware of a bait & switch/scam, doesn't make that practice not a bait & switch/scam.
  - therealx 6y ago
    It also means the market is opening back up. The code of projects gone by still exists, and it's not the worlds biggest effort to make a photo app.
  - byte1918 6y ago
    > Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation 'unlimited backup and storage of the photos' was the market pitch, whether people read the TOS is another thing. I can see why some people would feel unhappy with this and I can't blame anyone for that but on the other hand I wish we would stop taking these vague market statements at face value. 'free', 'unlimited' and 'forever' can never go together in a capitalist market. And I'll abruptly stop here because I would derail into things like law and ethics which, I think, are out of my scope. > while competitors to it went out of business This is honestly a tragedy that happens all across the industry at the moment.
kartayyar 6y ago
What is the bait and switch ? The stuff you uploaded already is still free. It's for more usage. You don't like it, you have the option to take your photos somewhere else.
- acdha 6y ago
  People don’t join a service like this intending it to be a static archive. They were told that this was an easy way to automatically save space on your phone and protect your photos in case something happens to your phone, started building a social network with their friends and family, etc. Now the choice is to pay or walk away.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    I fail to see what's wrong with either of those options. Switching photos apps is not hard.
    - fernandotakai 6y ago
      and you can easily download all your google photos. (source: i did it)
    - acdha 6y ago
      It’s not hard if you have a computer in addition to a phone, enough storage to hold a full local copy, and don’t mind spending time getting all of your friends and family to switch.

ehsankia 6y ago

Not only that, but a product that is financially self-sustaining is much less likely to get killed. The majority of products Google kills are the ones that doesn't get traction and run at a loss. If you want Photos to have a future, you'd be happy that it's trying to be cash positive.

murgindrag 6y ago

I'd be more than happy to pay for a privacy-respecting product like Google Photos. I'm not happy to pay to be the product, or to have something I rely on swept out from under me.

therealx 6y ago
Nextcloud's isn't bad.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  I tried Nextcloud a long time ago. It was buggy. I really, really wanted to pay for it at the time, but it didn't quite work. Should I try it again? I also might be confused, but I thought they kept some key parts proprietary. I'm now looking, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps something changed (perhaps even my memory!). I'm a lot more happy to pay for 100% open-source than 90% open-source. Is it fully open-source? I'd love to pay for a reliable, hosted, open-source solution.
  - therealx 6y ago
    It's a lot better now. You should read on the history of owncloud/nextcloud to answer your proprietary questions, but the short verison is: nextcloud is open as can be and in really good shape. It will most likely never be quite as magic as Google Photos, but it's close enough to not miss GPhotos. Email me if you want to keep chatting about it or if you want to get a login to my intance to check it out :)

echelon 6y ago

I'm actually glad to see this. Unlimited storage is unsustainable. I don't like seeing things tied to advertising revenue. It's not comfortable from a privacy perspective, and it's certainly not competitive for other players wanting to enter the space without the dollars from Google's huge advertising funnel/marketplace/ecosystem. You'll notice Google also started to clamp down on Gmail trash storage space, and I'll bet they're going to place more limits on Drive and unused accounts. I wonder if this is antitrust driven? Or are they hurting for space? We haven't seen this crop up on Youtube, where I bet they're really parched for disk space. Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?

ZainRiz 6y ago
Seems like hard drives aren't getting cheaper by that much of a margin nowadays [0] Combine this with growing usage, this might make their projected costs much higher than expected [0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Technology finds a way...
  - karmasimida 6y ago
    Technology has limits
harha 6y ago
Possibly, but given its google I wouldn’t assume it’s more (or less) respecting of user privacy just because it costs something. For the business products there may be strong business rationale behind it (it would categorically rule out too many applications), but for a consumer product I doubt that they don’t try making money both ways.
stev0lution 6y ago
> Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed? Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago: > Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes > YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 for discussion)

rbecker 6y ago

> Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. Anger could be due to: 1) Kill competition by offering product at a loss. 2) Once competition is dead and people are invested in the product and ecosystem, start charging.

usrusr 6y ago
And "competition" in this case isn't just other photo cloud service companies, it's also the entire habit and ability of offline bulk data handling. Having opted for a smartphone without microSD because storage was low priority, having favored the ISP when it was time to decide between spending money on more bandwidth and spending money on an NAS, these things. People have become addicted not only on the mental level.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

GuardianCaveman 6y ago

-“ Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).” The level of snark in your comment is really unnecessary. There are many valid points in the comments on why we are upset but you’d rather just straw man us instead of acknowledging thosey or even leave the snark out and make your case.

kartayyar 6y ago

It also means they will hopefully clamp down on worse monetization features like sending you notifications to go buy a photo book. Charge me for it and then just focus on making the best product. I like this change a lot.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dontfiremepls 6y ago

Because it's anti-competitive dumping. The dirty secret of SV is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: burn billions of dollars of money to offer 'free' or goods and services, gain a dominant position in the market by driving the honestly priced competition into the ground, then jack up the prices and fleece the customers. Uber is the poster boy of this strategy, but it's not the only one. The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0) possibly at a loss, or shut it down and offer a one-click migrate-my-data button and empower customers to shop around for the price / quality tradeoff they are willing to pay for. Of course, that will never happen, because antitrust in this country is toothless, paid for by the exact same corporations that engage in anti-competitive behavior.

nybble41 6y ago
> The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0)… This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in. Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.
- dontfiremepls 6y ago
  We are going to lawyer this, aren't we? The service was promised for free, not per photo storage. The expectation is that the service will continue to be free. From what you're saying, (most of) the future use of the service, which consists of uploading and storing new photos, will be charged. Velvet gloves dumping.
  - nybble41 6y ago
    > The service was promised for free… Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.

havetocharge 6y ago

There's a lot of anger just because 'Google'. Whatever reasons provided that would not be appropriate for others will seem okay when applied to Google.

dwd 6y ago

You always pay for using Google products. When it's in their interest to make it free - to drive usage or gather data to train AI, you pay with your data. Once that data is no longer of any value they then make you pay with cash. Google Maps API, soon reCaptcha are other products that started out free. Ever tried a search you may have done 5,10 years ago? Good luck finding obscure old stuff in Google's index even if it still exists - they just don't keep everything forever once it can't have advertising put against it.

bassman9000 6y ago

Surprised to see the level of anger here about this. It's getting tiresome to see multibillion revenue, tax offshoring companies backtracking on their customer promises. FTA: As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.

animeshjain 6y ago

I agree, and would like to pay Google (would have already done so earlier), BUT, there is this gaping trust gap. I find it hard to trust that my account won't one day be randomly banned with no option to communicate with a human customer support agent. Based on a cursory search, these bans are not so uncommon, and it is just scary [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057365 [4] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5016170?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5016170?hl=en (edit for formatting)

deleted 6y ago
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glenstein 6y ago
Right, this is the problem. I'm sure many of us would be happy to pay for someone to handle comprehensive photo storage the way Google Photos does. But Google can shut you out forever at any point without a warning, and it probably still is data-harvesting to bolster its services even with a paid version.
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
This is a completely legit reason to not trust Google with your data, but won't it apply even more when the service is free?

perryizgr8 6y ago

Problem is that google will probably still kill it even when people are paying.

0goel0 6y ago

Like news

wolfgke 6y ago

> This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it). Google still collects data.

richrichardsson 6y ago

I am already paying for Google Drive, and a huge part of what sold me on paying for it was that Google offered free photo storage if I was happy with a potential slight quality degradation.

vaccinator 6y ago

I'd rather host my own rather then give my pictures to Google... They already have too much of my data. I use nextcloud.