I means it's always good to reduce reliance on anything, so I won't argue against that, but I won't agree much with your reasoning.
The cost we were actually paying on the Google Maps API was hidden. The cost was mostly paid using user data and advertising. As a matter of fact, the API is still free on smartphone ;). They just realized that it wasn't worth it to get that data on the web and thus increased the cost to the true price. The fact that there was already some competition to Google Maps which was much more expensive tells a lot.
That's not something that's going to happen on the cloud though. You pay the real cost, they aren't monetizing it from a side channel (though they may profit a tiny bit on the side by lowering their infrastructure cost, it's not the goal and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't used their own cloud offering that much). The profit come from the price, not the user data.
It wouldn't be a good idea for them to increased theses prices, as competition exist/can exist, and they would just hurt themselves on the long term.
Unexpected pricing changes have already happened to Google Cloud offerings in the past. Google completely redesigned their App Engine pricing scheme in 2011. In practice this meant a 65x price increase for one of my small services. [1] Among the changes was that the 2008-2011 pricing was based on CPU usage, while in 2011 they stopped charging for CPU usage and instead introduced a slew of other pricing metrics, including the classic VM instance idle time.
While the pricing changes frustrated me, they did not drive me away. What ended up having a much bigger impact was that Google just deprecated everything. Some parts of classic App Engine still run in legacy mode, but get no updates and instead you get constant notifications that you should rewrite your app to fit the new Google Cloud model.
The cost we were actually paying on the Google Maps API was hidden. The cost was mostly paid using user data and advertising. As a matter of fact, the API is still free on smartphone ;). They just realized that it wasn't worth it to get that data on the web and thus increased the cost to the true price. The fact that there was already some competition to Google Maps which was much more expensive tells a lot.
That's not something that's going to happen on the cloud though. You pay the real cost, they aren't monetizing it from a side channel (though they may profit a tiny bit on the side by lowering their infrastructure cost, it's not the goal and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't used their own cloud offering that much). The profit come from the price, not the user data.
It wouldn't be a good idea for them to increased theses prices, as competition exist/can exist, and they would just hurt themselves on the long term.