"Have as many email addresses on as many domains you need, anytime. No extra costs. All your projects, ideas, employees, family members and IoT devices are welcome. Pets too.
Migadu is a radically different, independent email hosting from Switzerland. We do not count your domains, mailboxes, gigabytes or teeth."
The only downside I've seen is they don't have 2FA for individual mail accounts. They do have it for the top level account management UI though which is the most important thing for me.
The support team is also great, I've not had many issues but when I have I often end up emailing the same few people and they respond very quickly (I am in an EU timezone though).
I'm incredibly happy with their quiet and high quality service.
It is a matter of perception. Your family members probably pay that $5 for a random coffee at starbucks. If you value your time and privacy, you'll be able to put that $5/month aside.
Also, it doesn't work on your domain.
is that really an issue? using all the special characters (assuming uniform distribution) gives you ~33% more entropy[1] for the same amount of characters, at the expense of increased input time (especially on touch keyboards) and being much harder to remember. why not just make your passwords 33% longer instead?
[1] according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85
It seems a bit off that my household can stream as many movies as we want for $11/mo, or have unlimited access to an enormous music catalog for $15/mo, but e-mail service costs more.
ProtonMail looks about the same, actually more expensive, though they have a more attractive $30/mo plan for 6 users that it includes VPN access.