I know how you feel. I'm locked out from Google Play Developer console. I've been locked out since beginning of June and have not been able to get in touch with anyone. I've used the contact us form several times and no one has emailed me back.

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See, you're confused - you actually think you're a customer of these companies.

I'd venture to guess that they do have customer service, but you do t fall in to the customer category. Now if you started a $100,000 'branding campaign' with them- the you'd be a customer.

I pay for gmail, I pay for drive, I pay for adwords, I pay for google apps, I pay for GCE and play store. (and undoubtedly a plethora of other services I couldn't remember)

I think I fit at least some definition of "customer".

And I'm still not asking for free support, I'd gladly pay Google 2k an hour to get someone to assist me.

You're paying to be a power user, and you're still not a customer in Google's eyes. As the parent said, the only true customers are the advertisers who buy your information and eyeballs from Google.

I’m beginning to think that Google is too large to have actual customers, per se, since any group of paying users is still too small for Google to need to pay attention to.

But I am an advertiser! And surely GCE customers are customers too.

(My GCE spending has been far bigger than a hobby project)

> The modern policy of no customer support by these services is a little worrying.

I've got a mixed feeling about this.

On one hand, because a friend and I operate a mostly-free opensource online service, I can appreciate the cost associated with even reading customer e-mails and triaging which one is important to reply to. For a free service, especially one that has millions of users, it's just not economically justified to run effective customer support. And it's not a good move to take someone's account away, but then again, it's a free service so pretty much the account belongs to the company, not the person.

On the other hand, not being able to get any support from Google when their APIs change and break our stuff is annoying (keeping it polite :).

Perhaps there is a model there for services such as Instagram to offer paid support. I'd gladly pay for Google developer support if that was an option, but it doesn't seem that they care enough to offer it.

> Now I'm out 5 years worth of emails and have no way of contacting google (Despite being a paying google apps customer and registered on their payroll system).

You do know that Google offers 24/7 phone support for paying customers, right?

https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/support/

Yes, but that support can only help you with business accounts. Not with personal accounts, even paid ones.

That's interesting, didn't know that. Hmm, that is definitely a weird dichotomy.

I have my own domain with a developer account (I can install my own software) for a couple hundred dollars per year with unlimited email accounts. You can get hosted domains with some limitations for only a few dollars per month. And I get immediate phone customer service 24/7. Years ago I decided not to use gmail or any of the free crap to avoid the kinds of problems you are having.

Are you really Instagram's customer? As in, they accept money from you?

They accept money from us by selling our data. There is a transaction, it just isnt conventional.

There is no transaction , it is called crowd sourcing. You're working for Instagram, Facebook and Co for free,in exchange of a "useful" service. You are wilingly giving up personal informations for free. The customers are the advertisers, you are the "user".

I think that anyone reading the post you're replying to understands what the poster is saying. Feigning ignorance just makes you come off very poorly.

And what exactly is the poster saying? That they have a contract with Facebook whereby the poster gets to use Instagram in consideration of the quantifiable amount that Facebook earns from selling any and all data that the poster gives them?

What the poster said is pretty straight-forward, if you can't understand it then the concept is either beyond you, or you don't want to understand it. You don't have to agree with what the poster is saying, but so far you haven't voiced disagreement, you've only projected ignorance (real or fake) over what the poster actually said by continually asking for clarifications. If you want to form an argument, then by all means go ahead, but none of your posts thus far are good examples of how to do that.

And to be frank, I'm not sure if I can read stuff like:

> That they have a contract with Facebook whereby the poster gets to use Instagram in consideration of the quantifiable amount that Facebook earns from selling any and all data that the poster gives them?

in any way that gives you the benefit of any doubt. I mean c'mon. The poster said that there was an "unconventional transaction" happening. Since when does a "transaction" imply such a contract? It comes across as you purposely being obtuse either because you enjoy trolling or due to some OCD-like need to be "right" on the Internet. If neither of those are true, then I apologize, but would suggest that you reflect on how you are coming across to others.

I don't use Instagram. But in Googles case, very much yes. And I'd like to give them more money for some customer support.

May I recommend Fastmail? Only sent them one support request of sorts, which was more of an alert that they were letting too much spam through. Got a detailed reply and the customer support rep even tweaked my spam score threashold settings. All in all a class act.

Fastmail is great. They're also doing a lot of interesting work to bring mail access protocols out of the dark ages with JMAP.

https://github.com/jmapio/jmap

I'll definitely check them out. Picking a new email provider is really hard, reliability is key. And to me gmail used to represent the ultimate reliability, but no more.

In my experience over the last 7 years they've been rock solid, no lost emails that I can discern, only 2 or so short incidents when they were down for a little while for whatever reason. Storage reliability might not be quite as high as for Google, given that one meteorite in the right/wrong part of the North Atlantic would take out their NYC and Amsterdam colos, and no doubt the Iceland one they're setting up now per recent email, see https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/architecture.html for lots of details.

On the other hand, they're a lot more transparent than Google, their special sauce does not include their infrastructure, most of which is open source or they've open sourced, and no doubt due to their singular focus and relatively smaller size you can get contact real people rather easily, sign up for updates on their software and infrastructure, etc. Google is so big that, as you've discovered, they don't have to care.

I'll second the FastMail recommendation. I closed several Google accounts and migrated them to FastMail a few years ago and it has been a good experience. The UI is very much faster and spam filtering is every bit as good as GMail's was. No complaints about uptime, either.

I'd definitely recommend Fastmail. Fast, clean interface, easy to use, very customisable (including wildcard mailboxes), and great support. They've got a really interesting blog [1] with some technical content on there as well.

[1] http://blog.fastmail.com

I wish more people knew about rollernet.us . They're incredibly excellent as an email service provider for technical users.