[dev213]

I don't understand your point about it being unusable as a free user.

I only upgraded to a paid tier about a year ago, before that I was using for about one and a half years for free with 0 issues.

Notifications never arrive late (at least on the IOS app)

Maybe it's because I'm not a heavy E-mail "Power user", but I see most of these as non-issues (this depends on your use case, of course)

Another huge pro for me, as a resident of Germany, the data stays in Germany and is protected under our strong data security laws.

I do have to agree, the search was kind of sucky for a while. But imo it's improved a lot is also pretty useable now.