Source (Bluesky)
Then cancel I guess.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Fuck AI
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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.
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.
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’re using us to train it and offloading the costs of training it to us. This isn’t for us or customer service or whatever, they want to use their AIs to further develop them is all
Very Plausible
A buddy works at Microsoft. This is exactly what they're doing.
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.
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!
Cancel sounds great! 👌
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. 😞
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.
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Time to cancel then.
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.
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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.
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Ai is suppose to make Everything more efficient except all I see is it driving costs up by an insane degree.
Dont use subscription services.
This does not work for nearly 100% of people. Fucking health insurance is a subscription. Guess a lot of Americans don't have them, though.
Pay for services that respect their users
FTFY
Proton mail, mullvad, bitwarden to name a few
The only thing you can do about it is lower my plan?
Wtf is google offering that you're paying for anyway? advertising?
Google Workspace (GMail, Meet, Calendar Drive, Docs, Sheets, ...) is a popular alternative to MS365 among companies.
🤢
Things change.
Ten years ago I joined a newly formed small company. They were all-in on the google suite for everything, and it was great. Gmail, docs, meet, all joined up really well and fully cloud so everyone could work just as easily from home as in the office, with no on-prem hardware or VPNs or anything. It made the work so productive.
But of course enshittification happens, corps get evil, and everything goes down the toilet.
These days I am degoogling as much as possible and would never choose g-suite again, either personally or for business, but 10 years ago for that small business it was a godsend.
It's not like 365 is so great anyway
when AI came around, they realized ai is costing too much, so they have to force it on customers to make them pay off thier debt.
Storage on google drive comes to mind. Not that I pay for it, but I know it's something others do.
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.
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.
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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.
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Paying for corpotrash.
OBVIOUSLY the ONLY reason why FIRING YOUR WORKFORCE and Replacing it with ONE AI is MORE Expensive is because of TAXES!
Why sign up in the first place?
The only reason I still have a gmail account is that the old people in my family would lose track of me if I dropped it.
Most people have had these accounts from before AI was in the zeitgeist. They're essentially feeling locked in or too lazy to change.
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.
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
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