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Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
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US cellular data plans? Where it's throttled after soft cap?

Although I will say it's been nice to have them give more transparency around their actual soft cap numbers.

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That’s an example of where unlimited can work (because the limit is a number of hours of degraded service which is quantifiable).

Storage was already a hairy beast with the original setup, and it would be much better if they had defined limits you could at least know about (and pay for).

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Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
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Google does not have unlimited. I had to pay to increase my storage.
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Google Drive reneged on unlimited storage for Education accounts once they realized that universities also contain researchers who need to store huge amounts of data.
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Not only did they cut unlimited, they went to insultingly low limits with not much warning after all their nice promises. Moderately large universities ended up with less space per student than the 15GB they give out to anyone for free. It was a pretty bad rug pull.
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Massive fraud from abroad didn't help there either. A favorite backup spot for terabytes of pirated media, complete with guides on which schools had good @edu addresses for it.

Hadn't even considered your obvious point, a good one!

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Google forced everyone off their deprecated G Suite for Business plan (which had unlimited storage) and onto a Workspace plan.

I had to give up and delete plenty of data because of this. That data was important to me, but not important enough to pay their ransom.

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YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
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We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
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YT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.
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True, it's more likely to be aimed at stemming the tide of 4k video that nobody watches - but luckily they're worth more than Disney right now so we don't have to confront that ... yet.
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YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
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You can only do it during growth phases or if there’s complimentary products with margin. The story I was told about Office 365 was the when they were using spinning disk, exchange was IOPS-bound, so they had lots of high volume, low iops storage to offer for SharePoint. Google has a similar story, although neither are really unlimited, but approaching unlimited with for large customers.

Once growth slows, churn eats much of the organic growth and you need to spend money on marketing.

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>and "unlimited" is required to compete.

And there speaks marketing.

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Or they're selling their product to a market where the purchaser doesn't understand how much they would need to pay if they were paying by the gigabyte (or even how to check how much they would need). Telling those people they don't need to worry about that "detail" is a key selling point. Backblaze has a product for people who understand the limitations of their consumer product and don't find them acceptable: B2, which is priced by the gigabyte.
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>doesn't understand how much they would need to pay...how to check how much they would need...

...even nearly any frame of reference for anything storage related, much less gigabytes

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The solution to this is so simple that it would blow your mind. In regulated industries in the U.S. there is a law called "Know Your Customer" (KYC). If businesses actually made an effort to know their customers, they would not have any issues at all.

The real issue is that everyone scrambles to make a sale, and nobody stops to determine if they should actually make that sale. Funny enough, I blame all of this on marketing and sales.

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> And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.

Doing a bait-and-switch on a percentage of your paying customers, no matter how small the percentage is, may be "viable" for the company, but it's a hostile experience for those users, and companies deserve to be called out for it.

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On the other hand, subsidizing high-usage customers with low-usage customers is pretty generous to the high-usage customers, and there's no pricing model that doesn't suck a little.

Pricing tiers suck if your usage needs are at the bottom of a tier, or you need exactly one premium feature but not more. A la carte pricing is always at least a bit steep, since there's no minimum charge/bulk discount (consider a gym or museum's "day pass") so they have to charge you the full one-time costs every time in case that's your only time.

Base cost + extra per usage might be the best overall, but because nobody has solved micro transactions, the usage fees have to be pretty steep too. And frankly, everyone hates being metered - it means you have to think about pricing every time you go to use something.

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> Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.

So… Marketing has taken over, just as parent comment said. Got it.

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