I'm very surprised, even though I shouldn't be, that they're actually shutting the read-only goo.gl service down.

For other obsolete apps and services, you can argue that they require some continual maintenance and upkeep, so keeping them around is expensive and not cost-effective if very few people are using them.

But a URL shortener is super simple! It's just a database, and in this case we don't even need to write to it. It's literally one of the example programs for AWS Lambda, intentionally chosen because it's really simple.

I guess the goo.gl link database is probably really big, but even so, this is Google! Storage is cheap! Shutting it down is such a short-sighted mean-spirited bean-counter decision, I just don't get it.