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With profits at $160 billion in 2019 and a user base of $4 billion people, they make roughly $40 per user per year.

If a 14TB hdd costs them $200/year to run, 15GB of storage would run about $.21/year. Does that sound right? If storage was that inexpensive I would think think they wouldn't be restrictive.

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Not defending Google but I believe at least once Google has restored emails for a lot of users from tape backup. I imagine 15 GB for the user is at least three times as much from Google perspective. So sixty cents, not twenty?

I'm assuming Google's paying about 5x what the hdds alone cost, which I guess would cover backups, infrastructure besides the hdd cost, power, and software. But it could be more than that. 15x the cost of hdds seems high, but storage could be that expensive for them.

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