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If the only remaining difference was price I don't think it would cost much at all to maintain. IIRC a couple of things were limited. I ran into a few. - Redu

• WorldMaker 5y ago
  > If the only remaining difference was price I don't think it would cost much at all to maintain. You are thinking about marginal costs. Even if there is no marginal cost for a "free" priced tier, that doesn't mean the operating costs of the tier go away and that the tier isn't likely losing money. We don't have transparent data on how much in terms of operating costs Google was eating for these grandfathered in free accounts, but it doesn't take a lot to imagine there were some operating costs that Google was possibly eating for some time now. I would imagine they ran they ran some sort of analysis on the pros/cons of goodwill/marketing versus operating costs and a price raise made sense.