It also doesn't help that Google's free tier (15GB) is laughably small in 2026.
HDD capacity and Google's profits grew many-fold since that was last increased (in 2012-ish?).
It does seem ridiculous that over 20 years ago, gmail was advertised with a real-time allowance ticking away increasing, which started at an incredibly generous 1GB allowance and you could watch it tick up in real time faster than you could fill it with mail.
People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this.
20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.
It is small, but if you look at their competition it's still competitive.
Only Mega offers more for free (20GB).
Microsoft offers 5GB.
Ente.io offers 10GB.
Proton.io offers 2GB (if you jump through some time-limited hoops, most of which defeats the purpose of using a privacy cloud, you get a whooping 5GB free instead)
Filen.io offers 10GB, but you can get 30GB if you do a similar dance to proton and spam your referral code everywhere.