another underappreciated aspect of goog's full stack approach (app + model + cloud + chips): google made a really good app (gemini) and charges basically nothing. i made it my go-to chatbot as of ~2 months ago replacing chatgpt. so when i decided to build something my first instinct was to use gemini's api + gcp (vs gpt, aws, etc). so now even tho google is only making $20/mo from me for gemini the app, its making ~2 orders of magnitude more from me for running gemini models on gcp. the app is a just a loss leader for the cloud.

altho i have to admit claude makes switching costs between clouds much lower than they used to be