I think that this move will not bring the intended effect on Google's bottom line. The core user that is affected by this change is the enthusiast, setting up a custom domain for email for their family, opensource project, etc. This enthusiast user was advocating the Google services. I count myself as one such user whose recommendations has led at least 3 new small business customers for Google. Also their decisions to use Android over the competing platforms.

Now Google loses all of that. And since it is highly unlikely that they will discontinue their free Gmail, Calendar, Drive offerings the end of free custom domain accounts is unlikely to save them any money on hosting and will represent a net loss to them in the long run.

Roadsend is a development house unrelated to the PHP development team. I doubt that their compiler would make any noticable impact since they don't support many of the PHP's most useful extensions. I have not tested it but it looks to me that the people that would be interested in this are those that want to close source their own PHP code so I guess its only fair to pay for it.

Many useful PHP tools are open source. From the bytecode compiles such as APC and MMCache, debuggers (APD and XDebug).

I see tha fact that there are some companies out there providing commercial tools for PHP developers as a good thing(tm).