Increasingly of the opinion that "free service with no support that's structurally essential for an economy" is some kind of trap. Possibly just the most comfortable kind of trap, a local optimum from which it's difficult to escape.

This is starting to become important as countries (very unwisely!) start tying things like national ID and banking to smartphones.

I don't know if it's that simple. As a litmus test, try to set up your own mail server. See how many milliseconds it takes for it to be blacklisted by gmail. And then observe the response time for their support, when you try to clear up the confusion that google has about your intentions.

It’s free, but it’s not like they’re running Gmail as a charity, either. It has revenue and contributes to their other businesses.

Google’s support for paying customers isn’t much better unless you’re spending well into the millions per year.

AWS, on the other hand has proven willing to move mountains for me as a $15/mo customer.

Gmail is profitable. How much harm should profitable services be allowed to perpetuate in the world to enable their profit?

> How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect

Zero. OTOH, since I'm sure they are training on emails and archiving/profiling everything forever even if we delete messages.. those constant threats to become a paying customer before hitting some arbitrary small quota are still villainous

If it didn't provide value it wouldn't exist.

Maybe it's only legacy, but gmail brings customers to Google and their related services. Escalation then brings them on as paying Customers. As loss leader may make a loss if looked at in a bubble, but if looked at as part of the "Customer Lifecycle" then other areas of profit would likely be much smaller without the free gateway.

It takes me active resistance to avoid Google's paid services, and I'm staunchly independent in relatively rare air. The minor capitulation required to turn into a paying Customer would capture a good percentage of their erstwhile-free gmail users (I would think. Yes, conjecture, interested in explanations of alternative theories).

We might not be paying money, but we don't know what happens to our private data. Maybe it's not used at all, maybe used just internally, maybe could be even sold. Data of millions of users is very very valuable, even just thinking about how much targeted adverts could be placed with it.

Gmail shows ads to make money so it is not loss making. Google Workspace charges money per user (and still offers abysmal support).