Also I have created accounts for my children, my wife with very little costs. The magic? This very well supported project:
All of a sudden my hand written emails to clients were going to spam. Namecheap verified my spf/dmarc/etc was all setup correctly and told me there was nothing they can do.
I don't communicate often and am just using my personal email address for now, but I'm looking to switch providers
I've been exposed to that type of Kafkian catch-22 nightmare scenario all too many times :|
It's a very bad idea if you want to use the account as a Google account. i.e. smart home does not work, lots of user features do not work, there is no workaround to this other than "don't use a Google Workplace account for personal life things, get a Gmail account".
Example of the pain to try and migrate from Workplace to Gmail just to get the workaround working: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...
By far a better email service and the 2fa just works.
Doesn't this work for folks?
Before I migrated my domain and old emails to Fastmail I contacted their support twice to see what I got. Once I simulated an account lockout, the second was more of a technical problem. I can't remember the exact steps that I needed to take, but I do remember that their support was quick to react, had surprising technical depth, and fixed my "problems" faster than expected. I had no problem trusting them with my data.
Has anyone actually tested Google One's support?
I've not found an online service you can't switch emails with.
I've probably switched email addresses on 200+ websites now, and there were a handful that don't seem to allow switching email addresses back when I made the switch. The situation could have improved since then, but you're basically right, very few don't allow one to change their email address.
To give a baseline: I pay for email hosting through a reputable non-Google company. It costs me about $40 a year, for both the domain name and the email hosting, and it didn't require me to have any technical knowledge to set up. Compare that with, for example, my cell phone plan (around $100 a year) and it seems pretty affordable, or at least comparable to other common bills.
I think it's helpful to think of this in terms of other utility services. People tend to agree that heat, electricity, phone, etc. should be accessible to the non-rich. But those still cost money to operate, and the cost is paid by consumers. (There can be a broader discussion around who should pay for this, but the money does come from somewhere.)
If we decided that electricity could be free, but that it would be funded through personal data collection, that you could permanently lose access at any time, and that you wouldn't be able to get outages fixed in a timely manner, that most people would prefer the current model.
The bottom line is that email is pretty important to modern life, similar to a phone. One way to ensure that your email is reliable is to pay for it.