If that actually becomes a paid service, it must legally bind Google to provide some formal results out of it, or people that paid can now sue Google for something like negligence. Then Google can't conveniently hide all the details about of why accounts got banned when people demand in court. It's a whole can of worm for Google for morsel amount of revenue.

Seems like that would invite more bad PR than it's worth...

Because there's probably lots of accounts worth $50 to get into.

Yes, it would need to be some incredibly high number to keep fraud rates low, like $50000 per account.

Because that can be seen as a money making opportunity by one of their executives in future and the number of accounts that would need support could rise.

It seems they get away with the current setup and it's unclear they'd be more profitable by doing that. Maybe if there's enough backslash it will make business sense. At the moment I would find hard to justify internally. The only argument you'd have would be an appeal for empathy, which only gets you so far.

Interestingly, many people already pay for Gmail (or rather Google one) for extra capacity. Yet, I'm pretty sure they get the same support experience. I think it's just not worth for them to change, given that everyone seems ok with the current approach (that lady and a few others obviously aren't, but I don't think they really even make a dent in Google's reputation)

If you pay there is some identity attached to the account so it might actually possibly to recover the account, as opposed to ‘I don’t have the password nor devices previously used or any other recovery mechanism’

This exists… if you know a googler. I got locked out of my 14ish year old account due to the AI deciding I was no longer the rightful owner even with TOTP codes, SMS, and printed backup codes. I asked a friend who works at Google, and there’s an internal form they can fill out to recover an account. I received a non-template response less than 30 minutes later with a link to reset my password.

100% this. It seems so obvious. If edge case escalation is uneconomical, price it so it's not.

I once lost a Google account because of their "the password is not enough, we'll randomly decide what is" policy. It's very unpleasant to get to that "make another account" page, and realise it's all gone.

I'd have happily paid money to go through identity verification and so on to get it back. Its sad they're just leaving this money on the table, hurting both themselves and their customers.

Because it would look like "Google is holding my account hostage unless I pay them".

I can't believe I'm writing this, but this is where a middleman could help. Companies can pay a fixed subscription to become "Google Gold Partners" and get privileged access to tech support resources. Users with issues don't pay Google directly, they pay those companies to solve their issues with Google products. In this way Google is still incentivized to solve problems as quickly as possible.