It's very hard for me (and many other people) to estimate how many GBs of photos I would produce total because (1) I don't know what camera technology would be like in a few years and (2) I don't know how many years I will be alive and producing photos for.
I know that they can't just our old uploads free forever, but I'd like the product framing to adapt to my mental model rather than the other way around. They can still price it such that it's profitable for them.
Another issue I have is vendor lock-in. Sure, I can take my data out of Google Photos, but I can't take my data out for 5 years, and at some later point decide to use it again, and have it be in exactly the same state as it was before. A lot of metadata (edits, social interactions like comments/shared album data) would be lost. To me, these "non-exportable features" almost feel like ads, since they entice people to modify their content in ways that can only be shown to them in the future if they continuously pay for the service.
I think the Facebook/Google Data Transfer project would help this second issue to some extent. https://engineering.fb.com/2019/12/02/security/data-transfer...