[floatinghermit]

I am having a really hard time justifying paying for email in 2022. I had a discussion with my spouse who raised some great points. Hoping some of you that pay can answer with your thoughts on this. Note that this is from the perspective of a personal account. There's no doubt that a business account should be on their own domain on a paid account.

There are a few common reasons why everyone pays for email, but I don't find them justified in 2022 as much as they used to.

Your provider might go away/You might lose your address
This has indeed traditionally been a big risk. But if you are on gmail, I just cannot see this happening. 99% of people seem to be on gmail as their primary. Even if gmail does go away, pretty much everyone in the world just lost their primary email address and the world will figure out how to go from there. There have also been cases of people losing their email accounts, but again this is so rare that it almost seems like planning for an apocalypse.

You lose privacy with free email
This is certainly true, but even if we pay for email, do we _really_ have privacy? Facebook, Google, and Amazon still have all of our life info. Our friends are on these platforms even if we are not, and having our data in them irrespective of where we are. What are we _really_ gaining? It seems like a drop in the ocean with no meaningful result.

You get to use your own domain
I definitely like to use my own domain name, but this has definitely caused me to lose emails by the other party not understanding my email address, and assuming something that ends in gmail.com. It has also caused some raised eyebrows (and maybe eye rolls). Overall, I'm going to call this one a wash.

Overall, I feel like there's no tangible reason to pay in 2022 unless that $5 a month or whatever is completely insignificant to you. What are your thoughts? What am I missing?