Google isn’t what it used to be, but the free alternatives like DuckDuckGo aren’t really that great. Given how vital a good search engine has been to make any use of the internet since the late 90s, I think it’s not unreasonable to offer quality search at a reasonable price.
I’m not aware of any paid-for search engines, and I’m not sure what they could charge for without seeming greedy. Perhaps have a free tier that limits you to so many searches per day and a paid tier with unlimited searches and another with API access or something. The key would be to have a good-better-best system that makes everyone feel they’re getting a reasonable product for what they’re paying while keeping the experience serviceable for free riders.
Email is similar. While it’s not too hard to set up a bare SMTP server, a bare SMTP server will get you absolutely nowhere because every reputable email service will flag it as spam. The hard part is making the server pass all the sniff tests that other services use. You also cannot self-host because residential ISPs block port 25, again as a spam prevention mechanism.
I pay for Proton, not because I trust them per se, indeed the more a company trumpets about how secure and anonymous they are the more suspicious I get. But I trust them more than I trust Google and that’s what matters.
I’d say to the majority of people, that first part reads like nonsense.
The value add is thus “you don’t have to learn computer stuff.”
The person you’re responding to has clearly never been in charge of hosting a mail server. That shit is absolutely not worth it.
Free email sounds good until you realize you’re paying for it by letting them peruse your mail to scrape out ad data and feed their LLMs.
I’m pretty happy to pay a small fee to avoid both of the above.