A long time coming (Waffling, meandering, rantish) (Score 1)

Back in the heady days of the 90's when google started the domain administration services, it seemed like an excellent free service for us techies. Saved running Postfix, Sendmail, ClamAV, Spamassassin etc. on our own servers. So like many other techies I moved ALL my domains MXs over to their email services warning family that all their emails would be used by Google for marketing, ad revenue & improving their own spam recognition services, family where happy with this. Come 2012 the service is renamed G suite, all the same all be it the change to maximum 5 free accounts & a change in the T&Cs, that the "free forever" being dropped. Consequently I asked a raft of family members to move their domains to separate google accounts (no longer legacy free) Quite a fall out this caused. Not unexpectedly the service is removing all free accounts, with another rename to Google Workspaces. I assume they have trained up their spam filters etc. enough to not rely on us legacy users to be needed any longer & monetization is always a nice thing. Luckily I kept a gmail account for most chargeable services, unlike my Apple ID (exited the walled garden) & Playstation Network (Hacked & Closed by Sony) accounts I won't lose hundreds of pound in purchased products. So as with the rest of the demanded accounts for use of IOTs, even xBox. I shall be moving all over to my own servers, never to return again. I check carefully when I purchase a product that some IOT device service isn't going to lock me out after 3+ years, especially Games & Game systems. So to answer the Ops question, club together pay a couple of $ to get a friend with knowledge to set you up a service that will be with you for life. All of the free ones mentioned will ALWAYS become chargeable. For instance try & think of a Anti Virus software that didn't start out as free.