Cancelling a Google Suite Subscription Also Deletes Your Google Account

Google applies the worst vendor lock-in practices to prevent G Suite subscribes from cancelling their subscriptions. G Suite subscription fees steadily increased over the past years, amount to 10 € per user, per month and will be increase yet again in the coming months.

I was one of the early adopters of G Suite and started using it since the very first day it was launched as "Google Apps", 12 years ago. Some years later Office 365 SaaS offering from Microsoft, tried to enter the SaaS era as well. I am using Office 365 at work and it was and still is just broken, in every possible way. I do not want to go into details but if you doubt that Office 365 is just broken it in every way, try using it with Linux for a week...

So I still want to cancel my G Suite subscription. However when I do it, my account with all its settings, purchases, photos, videos and just all the data that was saved there for over 12 years will be gone! From a technical perspective it does not need to be this way as an account can be decoupled from any subscribed services. This way, after cancelling a subscription an account can remain but you just cannot continue to use the premium services that you have used as you have paid the subscription fees. Accordingly if you cancel your Spotify subscription, your e-mail account assigned to the Spotify subscription is not deleted, the playlists that you have created are not deleted, and the rest of your account remains intact - you just need to listen to ads to compensate Spotify. Whereas Google deletes everything that was ever assigned to this account, including the Android apps you have paid for and the movies that you have purchased on Google Play.

Unfortunately Google Takeout cannot help here as it only offers an export function which is not a goodwill from Google by required due to EU GDPR regulations. It is not possible to import the Google Takeout data dump to any other account, not even into another Google account.