The moment you start charging for preview stuff I think you give a tacit agreement that you can expect the price to not increase by a factor of 4.

that’s a somewhat naïve viewpoint.

I think the fact that everyone is like ‘wtf’ now kind of reinforces my viewpoint?

Doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but people won’t be happy.

Who cares about happy (in the short term), as long as they continue to pay.

Gmail was in beta for what, 2 decades? Did you never use it during that time? They've been using these "Preview" models on their non-technical user facing Gemini app and product for months now. Like, Google themselves has been using them in production, on their main apps. And gemini-1.5-pro is 2 months from depreciation and there was no production alternative.

They told everyone to build their stuff on top of it, and then jacked up the price by 4x. Just pointing to some fine print doesn't change that.

I'd be more worried about Google just discontinuing another product. For example Stadia was similarly high profile, but it's gone now.

More examples here: https://killedbygoogle.com/