For Free!

I hope people are starting to wise up to this game. It's not free; it costs Google a ton of money to run the servers and pay the programmers but this is the way everything in tech works now: The big players burn a small part of their vast piles of money giving their service away for free or cheap to corner an emerging market by forcing out small players who don't have the war chests to allow them to do the same. Once the big players are fully established the barriers to compete with their market dominance are so high that no one apart from other mega corporations could even dream of it. That, of course, is when the enshitification and price hikes will begin.