I was more worried about having to migrate all my Drive documents, shared folders, etc. etc. than migrating my email tbh. It may be hubris, but migrating email seems like a solved problem whereas untangling years of "Who created this folder? Who has the rights to add me again on a different account? Do I need to transfer ownerhsip of this folder so it keeps existing?" felt like a lot of manual labor.
Email is easy to migrate. If Google let GSuite legacy free account migrate to this new Essentials Starter it is a better solution than having to transfer your data to a @gmail.com account.
This "Essentials Starter" at least has access to Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as Chat and Meet. It also has a 15gb of storage per user.
I think we are not talking about the same thing. You specifically want to not have to migrate your legacy account data outside of email. Even if it means being limited to the resources you get and possibly not getting other Google services in the future as they have historically neutered options like this.
I and the other person replying to you are saying, you can migrate your custom email legacy account to a normal Google account and move your custom email somewhere else as you already have to do that no matter what.
So the difference only lies in whether one believes it is better to have a limited Google Workspaces Essentials Starter account vs creating a new Google account with a custom email address and moving your data there. I personally will take the latter.
I would like to keep using as many Google services as possible. And I also need to keep my custom email.
As of now it seems we have two options regarding our G Suite legacy account: 1) choose a paid plan and keep everything (including our current custom email address on Google servers) or 2) Do nothing by July 1st and lose access your Google Workspace core services and data, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet.
A third option would be (1) delete our G Suite legacy account; (2) get a new email server (same email address) and (3) create a Google Workspace Essentials Starter that would have all services but Gmail.
I also don't think they would allow a former domain registered on Google Workspace to create a Essential Starter subscription -- I read something regarding that but can't find it...
If they would let you migrate an arbitrary GSuite account to an arbitrary regular Google user account (or whatever the terminologies are, I hope you see what I am referring too), wouldn't that be a much simpler solution?