The correct and only option is to cancel your plan. Fuck google.
It was always the case that AI would be free or cheap to begin with, and it was always the case that prices will have to rise to cover their costs.
The way now is to cancel subscriptions. Show the companies pushing AI that there is no money to be made in it. Find another service that fits your needs, your ethical minimum, and your budget.
Cancel Google services, even the free ones, and find an alternative you truly like.
Then cancel I guess.
Why do they all act like AI is the holy grail ?? Phone update: here you go, AI. New app: here you go. AI. Websites: here you go. AI.
I've tried it, but AI sucks. All tech questions give non-working answers. Everything else, the AI always agree with you.
They've invested way too much to admit it's almost totally useless, and only useful in niche app, using sketchy conditions (training material IP...) and under tight control.
So they engage into heavy marketing and comms ops to convince the world that "AI" (very vague term BTW, what they offer right now should rather be called systems resulting from stochastic learning, credit for that naming suggestion is not on me) was a revolution and whoever doesn't get on board will be left behind in the dust.
It worked really well: corporate world is embracing the "AI everywhere" idea.
So now, everyone is competing to provide "the best AI assistant". And believe it or not: some people do ask for it!
Because AI is a solution in search of a problem. The current plan is to just put it in everything and hope one of them is better as a result. It's not the worst plan, because eventually some combination of things is likely to be useful, but it means a lot of useless shit will be slapped together. Of course it's also far from a great plan, because it means a lot of useless shit will e slapped together.
Google became prime enshitification too. You may only degoogle.
I degoogled earlier this year, and it has been amazing. Dont miss it at all.
I'd very much like to, but so far I haven't found anything which beats Google's free Non-profit plan. Our small association uses that, which basically gives access to everything Google has to offer: amongst others e-mail under your own domain, shared storage through Drive, a workable office suite, access to Google Meet and all that with central user management.
As crappy as Google may be, when money is an issue that's a deal that's hard to ignore. 😞
They're also bundling AI with their most expensive tiers. More than likely logging 100% of that revenue towards AI to justify this whole boondoggle.
There was a time when gsuite was a scrappy little service that gave you a serious option that wasn't Micro$oft (which at the time was deep into shady monopolistic practices) at a fraction of the price with replacements that were good enough for most small businesses.
If memory serves, the initial price was around $20 or perhaps $50 a YEAR per user. It was a steal if you were used to paying 10 times that for an annual subscription to Microsoft Office Pro plus needing to support a local NT server running Microsoft Exchange and probably a file server that needed backups and antivirus and on and on.
As more and more businesses have gone SaaS and put the whole thing in the cloud, Google has capitalized on this by cranking up the prices while probably scanning and using our data for their benefits somehow (mostly without adding additional features... Google Sheets is nowhere close to feature parity with Excel).
Thankfully we now have way more FOSS and private cloud solutions such as Nextcloud.
I still can't help but notice, however that feature-wise we really haven't gone anywhere in 25 plus years.
Injecting AI buttons into Google Workspace or whatever they call it now is probably not a feature that too many of their customers are asking for. But in the never ending push to increase revenue, it seems like now we're going to get it and that's the justification for the latest price jump.
I was checking recently for a side thing I'm helping with and Google's base tier is $7/month/user vs Microsoft's Business Basic, so no desktop apps, but basically fully equivalent to Google was $6/month/user. I was honestly flabbergasted.
Is it worth a dollar a month to not use teams?
Interesting, that's got to be intentional. Microsoft was so slow to webbify their Office suite (and probably thought why should we?it's printing money!) that they lost out on a generation of startup companies.
The thought of switching back to Microsoft hasn't even crossed my mind since I moved everything to Google around a decade ago. But now I'm actively de-googling because they're starting to mess with the core solutions.
Google wants to replace most of its features with gemini powered tools. This is just the beginning. They own youtube and of course they're starting to train their models on that too, they have a deal with reddit so they're also turning all known internet forums into a huge database.
It's so weird because Gemini is one of the dumbest of these bots out there.
They’re all very “dumb” in soooo many ways
Gemini will suck I believe when used via certain methods.* Going direct to their most expensive model via API produces competitive results,
but this was NOT the case in 2024.
*Surprising they’re OK with brand/product dilution but I guess the alternative is losing even more money as they burn more energy and tax more servers
Weirdly its good in image/video analysis in my testing???
but it doesnt filter properly and easy to bypass when using the APIThey already wrote they trained it on YouTube!
They've been pushing the auto dubbing feature super hard lately. Which isn't exactly the same thing but a bet they are lumping it in with other AI stuff.
Time to cancel then.
I suggest you check the degoogle communities here on Lemmy, or the reddit one (idk if you still use reddit) for the alternatives that suit you. I've degoogle for quite a while and never looked back. I don't even use YouTube anymore. But us that degoogle, don't necessarily choose the same alternatives, as we have different needs, requirements or skills. And there are a lot of options, especially if you are willing to pay for services as you obviously are given your predicament.
If this is due to you owning a small business and this has been your chosen service, the shift can be a bit daunting, but many people have degoogle their small businesses with no problem and even saved money afterwards. This depends on what you end up choosing.
I'm sorry for the situation you're in. Take your digital sovereignty back as a response to this type of corporate decisions. And remain vigilant. As some of the alternatives might become as corrupt one day.
Good luck on whatever your decision may be.
Do you use a privacy-respecting frontend/mirror for YouTube or simply accept most things won’t be on Nebula/wherever and reclaim that time to do something else?
I supposed the answer theses days is just the latter. I was really deep into youtube at one point, but I realised that the YouTube algorithm regardless of what I did was always trying to rage bate me. I follow a lot of environmentally conscious news and subsequent activism and solutions. And on YouTube, the algorithm was always throwing me climate deniers, flat-earthers or doomsday preppers because permaculture for instance has been invaded a lot by this last subgroup I mentioned. Didn't matter how much I clicked do not recommend this channel. I started experimenting with it and realised this was a feature in the expeience. So I decided to take a break from youtube, and started feeling a lot less anxious and less on edge in daily conversations. So I just deleted the account.
Not all of the channels and content creators I liked are on Nebula. Not at all. But Nebula and Curiosity stream alongside it as a package is a much ealthier and less deranged place to be for me. But I don't use them all that much either anymore.
Peertube is interesting for me and a specific subgroup of us that land here on Lemmy, I think we are their very tiny core audience. As fediverse believers I guess. But I doubt that peertube can grow. The model is not profit driven, and therefore people who make their livelihood from youtube will never transition to it.
I just reclaimed my own intention online. I only use non-algorithmic driven platforms. I want to drive my experience and only go where I decide to click and not be "influence bombed" with suggestions. So, no Meta for me either. No reddit anymore either. For the same reasons. That place has been a shit show for a long time now like YouTube. I have a Pixelfed account and a Lemmy account and that's it. This Lemmy account is recent but is only because Lemmee is shutting down, and that is where I was registered until a couple of days ago. Not even paying for Nebula or any streaming service anymore.
I'm sharing my experience, not trying to convince you of anything. We all have different needs, expectations, and should make our decisions according to our contexts. And YouTube has really incredible people in there. But to me it was too much like trying to find diamonds in a cesspool like situation. But that was me.
But if you're struggling with some form of anxiety, I really suggest you take a break from it all, even Lemmy. At first you're gonna feel really bored and restless, but not long after you are gonna feel a lot calmer. It really feels like detoxing.
If you're fine, then ignore this last bit. And I hope you keep being fine.
Cheers.
The only thing you can do about it is lower my plan?
Since Brian hadn’t already cancelled Google for being awful in every other way, this is exactly the push he needs to stop giving them money and switch to better, cheaper options.
OBVIOUSLY the ONLY reason why FIRING YOUR WORKFORCE and Replacing it with ONE AI is MORE Expensive is because of TAXES!
Adobe is doing this too and unless their AI is going to fix the legacy bugs the company clearly doesn't care enough to fix then it's not good enough to cost more.
Affinity
GIMPEtc.
Oh don't even get me started. I know so many softwares and their limitations and if I could cut Adobe completely out of my workflow I wouldn't wait another second.
Lots of victim-blaming in these comments
Nobody is forcing them to use Google services. And under capitalism voting with our wallets is all we got.
Nobody is forcing them to use Google services.
If you’re a small business with no IT budget, your options are pretty limited.
You can choose from 2 or 3 horrible companies that actually integrate with your stuff out-of-the-box, or you can do a bunch of manual work that none of your competitors are doing.
For a lot of companies, it’s not ignorance or carelessness, but a sober understanding that they’ll have to “render unto Caesar” before they can move on.
they could make it when you opt out from AI features, you dont need to pay for the AI features. but they are Greedy so they will probably not do that.
They wouldn't be able to make MONEY off of AI, otherwise, cause most people would decline it.
Oh yeah
You would, and I would, but you are over estimating the general public who has proven time and time again they do not know what's good for them. A lot of people would opt for something they don't fully understand just because it's "the latest thing".
I really hope for all this AI no sense to end with the comeback of the internet before all this fucktaroos took over with their exponential growth business shit.
Paying for corpotrash.
The soaking of customers has kicked into second gear. This is a great time to degoogle, as it will only be made more difficult
companies pushing out AI, know they are losing money on AI because it cost more to deploy it, and they arnt generating any profit from it. via the expensive, environmentally unfriendly AI data centers.
Yeah same thing with slack
For my business, I'm pretty happy with Zoho Workplace.
lol Google watch out enshittifying given ppl recommending Indian tech companies over you
Who’s Europe’s Google/Zoho… Proton?
Zoho has EU data centers hosted by Equinix.
Which hoster are they using? Was looking into this but found it confusing for some reason.
I'm using Zoho with the EU data center. I don't know what hosting sub providers they use for the EU data center. Looks like it's Equinix: https://www.equinix.com/resources/videos/zoho-testimonial
Good for him. He is paying for evil so he gets what he wanted.
