[homefree]

Maybe they do pay for it? It's not obvious they don't. (edit: they mention they do pay for it below)

I would have written a similar comment and I pay for Premium. I don't use any other Google service at this point, but I do have an account just for YouTube (I dig into the privacy settings to disable all the things I can).

It wasn't really that hard if you use Apple for almost everything and Fastmail for mail.

I use DuckDuckGo for search and occasional search again on Google, but that's becoming less relevant over time with LLMs (and generally reddit or youtube is the best place to search anyway for most things).