> GCP is a non-starter because a false-positive YouTube TOS violation get you locked out of GCP

Of course using your personal account with a provider for both personal and commercial services, means that that personal account getting banned would lock you out of those commercial services.

This is true of literally any provider that 1. has users accounts, 2. has many individual users, and 3. has some kind of commerce that can be conducted through the platform.

(Consider: if you did all your business's commerce through your personal PayPal account, and then one day tried to sell something on eBay and the buyer filed a claim against you that made PayPal mad, now you've "lost your PayPal account." This is a thing that happens, all the time!)

And every time, in every case, the answer is the same: no one with an ounce of ops thinking should be using the same account on the same provider for both personal and commercial activity.

Every one of these providers that allows commercial use-cases on their platform, not only allows but either encourages or even mandates creating a separate account for business use.

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In GCP's case, it's even more clear, because GCP is actually incredibly wonky to use if you're not using it with a separate, GCP-specific account — namely, a Google Workspace account, under a Google Workspace that's 1:1 bound to a GCP organization.

Here's how you're meant to use GCP for commercial purposes:

1. Buy a corporate domain name (let's call it `corp`)

2. Sign up for Google Workspace, and associate the `corp` domain name with the workspace

3. Create a user account on that domain (you@corp)

4. Create a new Google Chrome profile (I'd recommend setting a specific window color); and in that profile, sign into that Google Workspace you@corp account for sync.

5. Run through the GCP onboarding as you@corp — tying `corp` to the resulting GCP org, and making you the Owner of `corp`.

6. Create a separate Organization Billing Account for `corp`, that invoices to your legal company, not you personally. (You can still use your personal credit card if you want — though that's still jank compared to giving them a corporate credit card through a service like Float, since that card can be in the business's name.)

6. Only use this you@corp-synced Chrome profile for work. Never use it for any non-work-related activities on Google properties. (Hint: go into the Google Workspace admin dashboard and disable all Google services you don't want that user to be allowed to sign into. Yes, you can disable YouTube.) This should be easy, because you can just keep those activities confined to your personal-account-synced Chrome-profile windows.

7 (optional). If you like, forward your "work email" (the user's Google Workspace email) to your personal email, so you don't have to check it separately. (Personally, I prefer to just be signed into both. The Gmail mobile app allows for multiple logins with both unified + separate inbox views, precisely because they expect people to keep things separated like this.)

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How do I know that this is how you're "meant to" use GCP? What do I mean by "wonky"?

GCP expects you to be able to create new, real email addresses under a domain in order to be able to create additional users in your GCP Project and assign IAM permissions to them. Because there are org-level permissions, above the project level, that are inherently associated with the org's domain. Because GCP Identity-Aware Proxy expects you to SSO through it with Google Workspace, and only lets you use personal gmail accounts as "external" entities if you let "anyone" sign in. Because user groups from an IAM [and even GKE binding] perspective are literally just Google Workspace mailing-list groups. Etc.

GCP is 99% designed around the assumption that you have a Google Workspace and are visiting the GCP dashboard while signed into a Google Workspace account owned/managed by the Google Workspace's associated org. To Google, "Google Workspace account" == "is a business"; "Gmail account" == "is not a business".

The Terraria dev couldn't get support from Google? It's because they weren't a business in Google's eyes, just a random anonymous user.

Google closed the account unilaterally? They don't do that to businesses (I promise; they send nastygrams if they detect you doing weird shit in GCP, but they don't shut anything down, because they know businesses sometimes do weird shit.) But they didn't know the Terraria dev had a business, because all they saw was a personal account.

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But why does GCP let you even use it without a Google Workspace account?

Because there are personal, non-commercial things a person can do with GCP (either explicitly or implicitly), and GCP supports doing these few things with a personal Gmail account.

One major place this comes up is in Google Apps Script. Unlike in Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, etc don't have a client-side scripting model. Instead, all user-supplied scripting-type automations inside these services execute on the backend. Which means they consume resources. Which means that, to run such scripts (esp. persistently), the user needs a "compute-resource-allocating container" attached to them — i.e. a GCP project. (This also means that the resource consumption by these automations gets billed to the user — with these bills just being eaten by the usage falling within GCP's free tier.)

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But you might be able to see how it makes sense, from Google's perspective, for them to blindly shut down a personal account's GCP usage along with everything else going on attached to that personal Gmail account, if they violate the Google TOS.

Because a personal account's GCP usage is supposed to be for, like, scripts that periodically auto-reorganize your Gmail inbox. Or for Sheets that periodically scrape a JSON file to keep cells pre-populated with fresh data. Not for running your dang business on!

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