Could you post examples?

In my opinion free email services either belong to other big corporations or provide lower quality service than gmail.

Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many.

I don’t like google and I pay for a different email account. I just wanted to remind that gmail may be hard to quit and that costs are subjective.

I have all my mailboxes with gandi.net. Each domain you buy from them comes with 2 fully managed emails, and I think 3GB storage each, for just over $1/month. I basically never get spam, nor blocked emails. They have 2 webmail interfaces too, but I don't use them. As a bonus, gandi financially supports a ton of open source projects, which never hurts.

I use https://mailbox.org/en/, it's from a small German company and I can use my own domain with the smallest plan for just 1 € per month. Their spam filter also seems pretty good.

Until the day you get german spam mails because all spam filter are trained for english mails. Had to add a few keywords to tune the spam filter.

> Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many.

I pay around 3$/month for Fastmail, I don't think it's expensive, an email address is the primary communication method everyone uses nowadays and it's useful every day.

Protonmail is my choice, it supports client-side encryption. Custom domain $5 a month - unlike Google you are not paying with your private data.

https://protonmail.com

If you're not paranoid about Russia, you might consider Yandex Connect. It supports custom domains and has free tier with ads in the web interface.