No doubt.  But you indicated they had costs to cover.  What costs?   They don't have dedicated servers?  I don't blame Sony, or any other company, for taking advantage of suckered.

My point is Sony isn't covering costs but just maximizing profits.  Nothing more.

There is more than zero cost to administration of an account, running and maintain servers, and the like.  The marginal cost per user is probably super low, maybe a couple pennies per month, though. 

This is about the most basic of services. If charging above cost, so much so, that it causes more people to outright not buy a PSN sub at all I think there is a missing opportunity of long tail revenue and good will.

Back of the napkin math here but:

With ~47m PSN, ~6.1m Plus Extra, and ~8m Plus Premium subs on a potential install base of ~40M(PS5)+~58.5M(PS4 117.09M/2)=98.5M, I think there is a large audience of could be subs that would willing to pay cost+some small extra to be able to play online. Subs are flat, the price is going up. I think this inevitably leads to less subs per the install base. NOT offsetting the costs with a basic bare bone package inevitably loses money.

I obviously have no idea of the numbers. But, presumably Sony has better information than you or I do, and they have determined that this is the right price to charge. I'm sure they didn't just pull it out of their ass. 

I might not be right, but beancounters aren't always right either. We also may never know the impact since I don't think SONY shows revenue by PSN.

Sony have lost me as their customer, I will mostly be gaming on PC from now on.

This is what I've tried to do but PC gaming comes with it's own issues. 

I did get my PC to run as a console nearly perfectly. The new Steam Big picture mode is fantastic for that. They really gave you the console feel this time around. Same old issues as before though. Controller issues. For some reason my controller will disconnect and I literally have to uninstall the device and reinstall it just to get it working again. This has happened twice in the last 3 months. So not a huge deal but the first time it took me a good 30 mins to resolve. It happened to my son and I was able to resolve it in about 10 mins.

This was just after having to buy a new controller and adapter because it kept disconnecting randomly. So having more controller issues I just said enough already.

Another annoying issue is my steam trophies stopped showing up. I hear the sound and I am unlocking the trophies but it's not popping up for me. Seems that's a well known issue from what I looked up online.

I've gone back and forth between PC gaming and console gaming. Usually one or other pisses me off and I switch back and forth. I love the performance games have on PC. I never have bugs and issues like people say online about PC gaming. On console games just don't work as good and the FPS is so low compared to my PC.

Aren't you the gamer that hasn't played a new game in the last decade, or am I thinking of someone else?

I have played some things - TloU 1 and 2, Ass Creed 4, Dad of Boy, Finding Ciri, Spider Man, Wreckfest, Inside and I'm sure some others.