I recently had a billing dispute with Google Fi. I’ve been a customer since 2016. I paid a bill and then the next day they gave me another surprise bill and shut off my phone service. I had bank statements and Google’s own invoices that said I had in fact paid this bill. During the course of the discussion I realized just how little power I had. Most of the responses seemed AI-generated. Escalating to a manager meant that I got a single terse email back with somebody who obviously didn’t even look at bank statements and the statements from Google Fi itself that I had provided to them.

During the course of my conversation with tech support I began to wonder how many people have they ripped off the way that they were trying to rip me off.

I have had the pleasure of working with Google on software projects, specifically their Google Earth Engine. I can’t help but be impressed with the quality of engineers that Google hires and the beautiful things they build. I don’t have a quibble with the engineers – I despise how google does business.

As a software developer I use Google products across multiple companies with multiple people. I use Google Cloud, Google AI services, Google Book search. I use Google Chrome as my primary browser. I have several Google accounts that handle various aspects of my life. I am a YouTube Premium subscriber.

Google is a fundamental part of my life and, at this point, has been for most of my life.

This is why it’s so heartbreaking to realize that our relationship with this company has become toxic.

Because of network effects, extracting myself from the Google ecosystem seems almost impossible. But this post is a first step on a journey of me at least trying.

I no longer like how Google does business. How do I organize my life – especially my professional life as a software developer – so that I don’t have to do business with Google? This is a new goal of mine.