I'll lose important things like my Google Voice number that I've had for a decade unless I pay for a business account.
It is very frustrating. I did a lot with Google Apps on that domain, and migrating that stuff out to a consumer account is a painful process.
For me ideally I would like to move to something else (even paid) just because someday Google deciding to block me for whatever reason scares me quite a bit after having everything for the last decade attached to this account. I would like to export my emails, switch my domain to the new service, and import everything - but I have no idea how realistic that will be yet.
It lets me track who is sharing my email address and gives me control over that (set up simple filter to automatically delete any email received at [email protected] when I start getting spam on it).
It’s been really effective - such a part of my day-to-day flow now I can’t go back.
The transition was pretty painless. I setup an email forward from gmail to my proton inbox using [email protected], every email I received at that address I’d go update my contact information with. After a bit, I was able to turn off the forwarding. Basically the classic strangulation pattern for microservice migrations applied to email.
I adopted Fastmail for my domain email, and it has been a good experience (I do know that Fastmail is a five-eyes company with all the related issues around privacy, and I researched alternatives for several weeks, but I guess in the end I was willing to trade privacy for ease-of-use, uptime and various other factors).
Now I am looking into getting away from other Cloud-provided backups such as Prime Photos, iCloud, etc., moving to self-hosted NAS storage.
I'm documenting everything here if you're interested:
Unfortunately... it was Google (so kind of hiring the wolf to care for my sheep, as it turns out).
And now they're cutting off all of us free tier folks. Which I can't fault them for, but still blame them for. Because I'm petty and entitled or whatever.