So why not pay for it?
But then when I actually needed supoort, they couldn't do anything but read forum posts to me. They were not empowered to escalate to actually resolve anything more complicated than "where's the button for X".
Even if you pay, Google still treats their users like shit.
Are you able to name a reputable email provider which isn't >$60/year or self-managed? My 65 year old mother probably wouldn't be interested in either of those two, but would be willing to pay for per-use support lines for the one time in 13 years which rendered her account inaccessible.
And lets not forget my father, who couldn't access his _paid_ Telstra/O365 standard-user work email. When I called the Telstra support line they gave me administrative access to the entire instance, no proof of ID necessary (I literally said I'm not associated with the company and calling on behalf of my father).
To be honest, I'm not sure which is worse now that I think about it.
Called them to get access to our account after a problem, and they gave me admin with no verification at all. Just provided the account name, was asked for new password. Like... WTF?
Tried telling their security people, who then denied it happened, let alone it being a problem.
Our DNS hosting was moved away from Dotster shortly afterwards.
My laptop has a warranty that costs $60 year and I get nothing, nothing!, unless I break it. And don't even get me started on my car insurance!
Let's turn this around. Why is Google offering a free service that doesn't meet reasonable expectations for how that service works?
My repeated experience is that Google is good at things like search, where people get what they get and individual humans don't matter to the company. But they're bad at things that require treating people like people.
After being a happy Google hardware customer for years, I just had a purchasing experience that was so bad that I'll never buy from Google again. Their hardware and software won me as a customer; their customer service not only lost me, but was so bad it has made me more wary of doing business at all with any part of Google.
For me, this is in the "do or do not, there is no try" bucket. They don't really want to deal with humans, so they half-ass it. I wish they'd just stay out of those kinds of businesses, as their dominance and indifference to profit can mean crushing competitors and preventing the emergence of a real marketplace.
I expected at least one response suggesting this. I, and many others would consider email access my absolute most critical asset, it's also extremely difficult to switch providers. It's not like your real estate goes 'nope sorry you can't prove yourself, we can't replace your lost keys without validation, sorry, go buy new stuff and live somewhere else' - I imagine that would be illegal in many countries even if the place was rent free.
I understand that Google support, if it existed, would be inundated with bad tickets. However, I don't imagine having a skeleton set of support staff and a support workflow that requires users to climb mountains to communicate with a human would really impact on googles bottom line. It would have stopped me venting in various places about the issue, and might end up losing potential sales when I/others push our employers to use $not_google because their support sucks.