It’s called paying for the services you use. You don’t even need to switch to a different product / provider, just pay $5/month and ~$10/year for a domain name. Then worst case scenario, you can move your domain off of Google Apps and not need to update your email address everywhere with everyone.
Exactly this. I truly don't understand that people put their professional career on the line for the price of a domain name.
I also use GMail, it's incredibly useful. But it's my own domain, and if there's a problem, I point the MX records of my domain name to another email provider and forget about Google.
2) The article isn't about Gmail, it's about an entire Google account where the author stated they ARE paying for extra storage for Gmail and Drive -- where you seemed to imply they're not paying. And buying your own domain does nothing for getting access back to your 10,000's of past e-mails or your 100's of GB's of files you're paying to store.
It’s called paying for the services you use. You don’t even need to switch to a different product / provider, just pay $5/month and ~$10/year for a domain name. Then worst case scenario, you can move your domain off of Google Apps and not need to update your email address everywhere with everyone.