Do people truly think that's expensive for email hosting?! Honestly, no wonder Facebook and Google keep trampling with the so called "rights" of people successfully by peddling "free stuff" -- even those in tech paid six figure salaries think fifty dollars for essential communication for a year for multiple people is expensive.
I don't think you get this correctly.
Many people use Gmail is because it's stable and came with Google Account, so they sign up conveniently.
Plus, not many people still using email as their main day to day communication method these days. After all, there are many specialized tools out there to pick (For example, some people may use Slack for work, and Facebook for friends etc).
So, I think it's not because $50/year is expensive, rather, it's because many people don't care anymore.
I'm going to also make an educated guess that someone who meets the "Spends time on HN, is in tech and is well paid" is likely to be someone who is concerned about "privacy" as well as leaks of PI.
How can I possibly reconcile those positions with $50 per person per year is too expensive?
However, the $75 paid tier "Professional" has multi-user support. I think you could probably use just that to run accounts for your family, if you desired.
If this is too much for essential communication tool which does not sell your information to others in the view of HN-reading, tech-working, six-figure-salary-having tech elite then we have a value problem.
What does have negative impact on my life is
1) paying for stuff (always, no matter how wealthy you are) 2) specially when it is less convenient 3) and has worse user experience (hard to beat gmail here) 4) while also having to invest time in educating yourself about alternatives and setting it up 5) and actually migrating to it, spreading the new email address, transferring data, learning all the ins and outs of the webmailer (if you use it)
Solve for some of these, do it really well and you have built something that people will be happy to use.
ProtonMail and FastMail and other paid for competitors are picking up the long tail.
> 1) paying for stuff (always, no matter how wealthy you are)
and until this changes as the mindset one can be assured that he or she would be monetized via selling and influencing his or hers behavior information. After all, someone needs to make money to pay the six figure salaries to people who keep Gmail running and we are unwilling to be charged for it.