You are missing something key. There is a very popular strategy that YouTube and Uber and a bunch of other companies followed. If you have a product with network effects you don't sell it for what it's worth right away. First, you heavily subsidize the price to maximize your user base, only then do you start charging what the product was worth all along. You got convinced that the unreasonably good initial offering is the norm and resent the inevitable switch to the sustainable real offering. That makes sense, a lot of people will be in your boat as that is basically the entire point of the strat, get you to join the nework by giving you a false impression of the service / product. I'm sure there is some greed there too, but it's not fair to ignore this part of it. Yes, they are making the service worse in order to make more money, that is a fact, however I think some / most of that is needed to cover costs and was planned from the beginning. The argument should be what fraction is needed. Zero, as you seem to imply, seems clearly too low to me. Regardless, it seems best to evaluate a service based on how much you currently get from it for the price (and relative to current competition) rather than to what you used to get for the old price. I get so much value from YouTube that I do not mind paying for Premium. Yes, it is now a much worse deal than before. I think it is still a very good deal.