Google has become one of the world's largest companies in giving free access to popular services such as its search engine, the E-mail service Gmail and the Android operating system, and make money from advertising revenue in various ways linked to these services.
But Google also has a number of payment services, often extensions of free offers. Premium subscription to free services. If you have a free service and a premium service, you probably want the user to choose the premium service, and then it is important to be clear with what you get for the money and sell it so that you really want the premium service. This is Google bad on.
We can start with Fitbit. The training app contains most things in its free version, and it would be difficult to sell pedometers and watches that measure health with the app if it did not. And then there is Fitbit Premium that to this adds … Well, I don't know. I go to Google's website for Fitbit Premium to see if I can be wiser. Here, Google is terribly keen on listing how much you get for free, so there will be long lists of features that are almost identical. What I can read about the premium service when I compare, I mainly get access to different types of workouts and coaching. But these in turn are delivered by other services and are just a selection from these so it feels a bit like paying to try other people's free offers.
When I last checked Fitbit Premium, the service was quite different. Then there were several detailed health measures that I needed the premium service to access. The only difference I find within it now is the sleep registration, where according to the headings the free service gives the sleep registration “only points”, while Premium gives “points-details” although both have an identical description as clarification: “See exactly how you slept with a sleep rating showing your sleep stages, how deep you slept and your recovery.”
Google thus transferring features from the premium subscription to the free subscription, which allows you to pay for a feature just and then discover that you had been given it for free for several months.
This is perhaps even more relevant with Google's AI Gemini, which is also in the Gemini Advanced pay version. I'm not even going to try to go through what benefits the pay version gives here, not least because the list will probably be out of date when you read this. Google introduces new features in Gemini Advanced while making features widely available to everyone so that Gemini Advanced is most closely based on a preview version of Gemini rather than a premium version. You may be paid for this, but in that case you should be clear about it.
Google has a clear payment service anyway, and that is the cloud storage. Either you do not pay and get some storage for free, or you pay and get more storage. Although Google separates in photos and other files, or they have stopped doing so, and we have Google One, which bonds the cloud storage with Gemini Advanced, or can only buy it in combination now. Have they changed since I last checked? No, I give up and hire someone else.