The era of 15GB "free" Gmail storage is ending - but the truth is that it never was
(www.androidauthority.com)
When they combined all google services to one drive, including Photos and mail sharing the same 15gb, I decided to drop all google services
Never looked back.
Google feels like a service you can't live without but honestly moving away from it works great for me
The only service that I still keep is Calendar as I need it to sync with my partners google calendar
I haven't really tried to see if things work with an other service