I’ve paid to use Google services before, and had the most miserable customer service experience with a company ever. Contact information difficult to find, and walled behind accounts you have no knowledge of potentially, and policies designed to be explicitly hostile (I had them admit that outright to me) - I ended up out of $500+ as a result, for which they only were willing to refund $20.

Google seems to just be an exceptionally bad actor - I’ve been starting to move away from dependence on them as a result, as they’ve proven to me that I cannot rely on them to be honest/transparent in the most important ways.

It isn't free if you have your own domain. In fact they prorate it when you cancel.

I have my own domain, and use gmail for free. Because I'm cheap, not because I care. One day I'll find a better solution, one that avoids Google (paid or unpaid) altogether.

Yeah, I got mine for free too since I've had my domain for a while, but I have a newer domain that I set up on GSuite, and was paying $5/mo for, until I realized I could set it up as a domain alias of my original domain and get it for free.