We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.
I use DuckDuckGo for search. Firefox for browsing. Just moved from Gmail to ProtonMail. And will do the same for Calendar.
I still watch Youtube and use Google maps as that's build in on my car, and I have an Android phone. I installed Lineage OS in my previous phone but started missing access to the play store and my banking apps.
It's honestly kinda frustrating how hard it is to move away from the convenience of big tech products, especially most of my friend use them already and companies usually don't care to support open alternatives if the user base is so small.