alt Hacker NewsI am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month to use your Gmail ($12.99 ad-free). I mean people would complain, but would that actually give a backslash? Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere? People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.
I suspect what is really holding them back is the loss of data, and the loss of the assumption that ~everyone has a Google account that they are logged into, which means they can be traced around the web. Google also benefits from this, since its anti-bot tool will be more accurate and less fustrating to users.
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Their existing premium plans start at $17 per year. Even pushing people to that level would be a serious upset. $10-13 per month would make everyone hate them.
> Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere?
Sounds mostly impossible.
> People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.
They're not used to paying for an email account.
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> I am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month
I think approximately 95% of all Gmail users would leave. Regular people are accustomed to paying nothing for things like email. And if I have to pay for email, I am not paying Google for it, especially not twice the cost of Fastmail.