People often react badly to bait and switch tactics.

The solution is to offer people a way to revert to a free personal account without losing access to their files, data, and digital goods they have purchased.

What they gave away for free included the promise "This will be free forever" (as linked in comments by others here).

> I don't think someone giving out free stuff owes me more?

But this isn't "more" then, is it? It's taking back what was already given.

I kind of chuckled reading this thinking about how Google even bothered to spend resources closing this legacy service. I wondered what metric they used to determine it was worth spending effort to shut this down.

Even if the cap was 1TB I imagine there is a large amount of unused but occupied hot storage that is part of the equation. Not sure what others but in general there has to be some financial sheet indicating that this is costing money and offering no value so it is time to sunset it.

To be fair I think that was per user on the domain, so probably could've created additional users to cycle through.

Main thing that was holding me back was losing the grandfathered free plan should I change my mind / find an alternative for photos (I'd quite like to keep Google docs etc), but I guess that's no longer a consideration