Yes, people pay with their personal data (Alphabet is not a charity)

> is gmail a paid service?

Yes it is.

We pay $6-$14 per user per mo, for the privilege of dealing with GMail's foistware.

Google can’t spend two decades getting bazillions of people to rely on what’s essentially internet infrastructure at this point, and then pretend their hands aren’t dirty when they suddenly crank the enshittification juicer up to 11 because they need to justify the gobsmscking capex for their largely hated new service. There’s nothing legally stopping them from doing that, but that’s very different than right and wrong.