You're right. And my reponse is weak. But.... That's really meant to discourage those "power" users (like me) from abusing and leaving big stuff in there, I think. It's not meant to encourage most people to pay.

The storage offering was way way less than that when everyone here signed up, though it was still vastly greater than anything anyone else offered if memory serves.

Vastly indeed. There were even (one or two) pseudo-filesystems which used a Gmail account as a backend, because, hey, a free gigabyte!

I vaguely remember Google had to put their foot down to disallow such use, that's how popular those filesystems became.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS

Agreed. I sort of figure that increase is due to bandwidth inflation and decreasing unit costs.