While I'm complaining about platforms, Google is on my list as well. Sure, there's the usual ad monopoly nonsense, where we're banking 37 cent CPM's lately, but let me turn my attention to their Workspace product.
Way back in the day, you were able to host your own domain email (in my case, popw.com) in Gmail. Later they added all of the apps for docs and spreadsheets and such. It was great because it was free, and why not, since Gmail on its own is free. There's no added cost beyond the code that recognizes the domain name. Two or three years ago, they declared that they were going to stop doing this for everyone grandfathered into it. That was a bit of a panic moment for me, because I've got a bunch of family and friends using it. Not having a good migration plan, they decided to just let it keep going. My thinking was that they should have brought back what they did at the start, which was limit the number of accounts.
A condition of the continued use was to not allow commercial use. OK, technically I have an LLC, but with the ad market being trash, it's not really a business anymore, it's just a hobby that costs $100 and change a month. Well, they (or the AI) thinks that I'm using it for commercial purposes. I appealed, and they (the AI) did not change its mind. No recourse, no explanation of how they arrived at this, nothing. If I want to keep using it, I've gotta pay for it.
Now, I do understand that I was getting something for nothing, for an awful lot of years. But was I? Gmail is all the same stuff. I can see the mailbox size of the users, and it's tiny. This isn't a company with a hundred employees neck deep in email and documents. The way I see it though, Google could cut me some slack when it gets to measure all of my traffic (Analytics), keep ad revenue from my video (YouTube) and get my ad inventory for basically nothing (AdSense). I don't get back what they take.
The worst part of it is that I'll pay the money for two accounts, at least.
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