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I run a Google Sheets-based SaaS. The default limit is 60 write req/user/min and 60 read req/user/min.

In my experience, that's plenty!

Especially so since Sheets has a very advanced API relative to, say, Airtable. For example, you can do atomic updates of multiple sheets in a single request. A single request can contain like 100MB of data. (It'll be very slow, and at this point, a person should question their life choices, but it'll work.)

We hit 60 read/write req/user/min pretty fast and yes, theoretically you can scale with the user numbers in GCP and by rotating them.

Probably because the sheets team doesn't want to be in the database business and there are lots of other Google products that let you use them as a database on purpose?

There’s something to be said for knowing a product’s limitations and sticking to it.

It might seem absurd there is no option to pay a bunch of money for “more”, but we also don’t really know what guaranteeing that more work cost. Could be quite a bit of the sheets infrastructure is built expecting those limitations?