Did I get lucky with being one of the early Apps for Your Domain users? We don't pay a bean for our company's Gmail accounts but seem to get most of the features (no ads, custom domain, etc).
Frankly, as a European I don't find the paid version worth the price tag (which can be hefty if you have a lot of freelancers working for you). Yes, it's Google Apps, so if you use the entire stack you can avoid the cost of a lot of additional services, but at the same time that means you need to be okay with storing all your confidential data with Google.
But for me the deal-breaker was the way e-mail accounts work when using the same Google Apps for Business account with multiple domains. At least when I evaluated it, there was no way to define aliases per-domain. So if you add both domain-a.example and domain-b.example and want contact@domain-a.example to go to a different person than contact@domain-b.example -- no dice. Also if you want to be able to receive e-mails on firstname.lastname@domain-a.example but not firstname.lastname@domain-b.example, again: not a chance. I'm not sure whether this has changed since then, but this is why I took my business to Fastmail and other isolated services.