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Gmail isn't completely free. If you cross about 15GB of total storage across drive, photos, gmail and anything else ( youtube is exempt) you start paying.

Now, while the cost to provision a GB of storage keeps dropping Google's prices haven't been revised down ever (from what I can remember).

I pay for Google storage and know of a several others who do the same. I suspect the number of paying users is growing

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Yeah I recently started to pay for it too, after using many 12+ years with free storage. It was relatively low cost compared to Dropbox (etc), so it was a natural move. No more stressing over about deleting photos from Google Photos, and I configured that extra space to use as a backup endpoint too (using Duplicati with Google Drive).

Probably one of the best value online services I paid for.

I recently reached a critical mass on my Google storage (95%+ full), and almost all of it was gmail, with less than 1.5gb for drive/photo. I decided to delete 5gb+ of emails instead of paying. I already had all of my file storage/backup needs taken care of, and I had plenty of emails that were providing me no additional value.

Photos, just like Gmail, is also a loss leader that drives people to eventually pay Google for storage or for physical photo books.

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