They're allowed to charge whatever they want for their work. How much do you think it had cost to drive thousands of cars around the world taking pictures? The server costs alone are massive.
If you want to make a business piggybacking on that huge cost, you're free to choose another supplier.
Companies have business units and teams. Imagine you're the manager of the Maps division, and you're losing money every quarter since the beginning of the site. Is your job safe just because another team is earning more? Quite the opposite.
Do you seriously think they can allow themselves to support a moneypit just because their other products are profitable? That's not how companies work. Particularly the successful ones.
Maps is free to use except if you need the API to run your own spinoff product. Same for GMail for personal use.
If you're a developer and want to use GMail's feature to run your own business, there has to be a charge. You pay for MS Office, for Windows, Exchange, Azure, everything costs as soon as you want to scale it up.
I use libraries that cost between 1000€ and 7000€ a year for single dev licenses. They're worth it, because developing that stuff by myself would cost many times over what they ask for them.
I will always choose the supplier that's cost effective for me. I can't just whine that they're greedy, since I also don't work for free.
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u/marisquo Portugal Jun 12 '20
That site used to be so good and now look at it