People got a decade or more of free email hosting from Google and now need to pay for it. I know one small business that sells physical products and got 200 free accounts through this program. To this day they never delete old employees accounts as a result because it had zero cost to them to keep it around (not that they cared about security).
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.
I recall at one point they were offering large (unlimited) storage quotas for these business accounts. Some groups were using rclone to interface for Google Drive to store warez and other large ticket items like pirated audio/video.
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.
I wish mine had 1tb - I was already considering paying as I'm forever bumping up against a ~20gb limit with Google photos contributing most.
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
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.