It's a charge per month at $2-$3. The lowest annual plan costs $19.95 USD.

My heartburn is Gmail was rolled out as near infinite storage. They told you archive, not delete. And for a while they had a ticker at the bottom showing your storage increasing over time. The cost is modest, but I feel Google isn't being true to the spirit of Gmail when they limit and charge for email storage.

I remember that ticker, felt neat. When it disappeared I assumed it was a sign Google had enough textual data to mine. Similar with their handling of photos hence free down sampled storage.

Throwing my voice in I now pay. It is worth the price to keep high resolution photos of my kids with effortless sync from my wife's phone.

Which it won't. Which is kind of the point the author is making (just instead of "free" in this case it's "3$")

While I do not feel that restricting Gmail and their other data collection tools to paying customers is in Google's long term plan, the potential of random price bumps on a highly integrated, wide ranging and very much closed product experience like the Gsuite certainly creates a problematic power dynamic.