Not just Docs, it's Google Drive that I find hard to replace (Docs, Sheets, Draw, Slide, etc). The recent debacle with Legacy GSuite motivated me to pay for a Microsoft 365 account, and create a sync of my Google Drive to OneDrive, converting the proprietary Google format into Office format. Then I do a 3-2-1 backup of the OneDrive files. (Backing up the local Google Drive folder is no good, because all you get is a stub of the Google proprietary files.)

Then I moved most of my other Google services (e.g. Domains, Gmail, Calendar, Search, Chrome) off to other companies and products (e.g. Cloudflare, Fastmail, DDG, Firefox). I figure that every interaction with Google proportionally increases the probability that my account will be terminated. So I moved off Google to protect my Google Drive, which seems ironic.

The last Google service that I need to move off is Google Voice. I haven't done a lot of research on this yet. If anyone knows of a good alternative that provides SMS-to-email forwarding, I'd be interested.

At least with office 365 you can save to older, less apt to be excluded from formats like doc. Personally I save everything in the old doc/xls/ppt formats. I hope they keep them around for a while. Mostly these days though I just have a server at home that I can vnc into and use openoffice. All that stuff gets backed up to backblaze. it's not as nice as google or office365 but it's mine and I control it and I won't be revoking my account on an AI whim.

Why do you still use the non X office formats? They're far easier for other office suites to read as their not just a memory dump of internal office structures.

specific formats aside, rclone can give you portability across any storage-as-a-service providers

Just bite the bullet and accept that any free replacement you do find is also going to have its downsides. Decent stuff costs money to develop and maintain, if you're not paying then you're doing a deal with a devil somewhere along the line.

Oh, I'd prefer to be a paying customer.

The issue is price structure. Github and Dropbox are great examples where I can be a Pro user and invite free users to collaborate, and it works great.

What we're seeing is a trend towards pay per seat with extremely limited guest capabilities if they exist at all. That's generally okay for businesses where $20/user/month is a rounding error on salaries. It just doesn't work for personal use.

Here is a self hosted alternative with real time collaboration https://cryptpad.fr/

Is office not free? I much prefer office online to Google docs but we have to use google docs at work :( though the collab feature is much better in Google docs.

While not a perfect replacement, I like hedge doc myself.

https://hedgedoc.org/

I use LaTeX ಠ_ಠ

Zoho?