Not the parent, but tech-savvy consumers are willing to pay more for a better service. If there was an email provider better than gmail, with no spying, total transparency etc, many here would switch in a heartbeat even if it costs $5/month.
Not sure why GP assumed this must be free of charge; tech-savvy consumers also tend to have money.
If there was a cloud provider with solid infrastructure, full transparency and insight to the network down to server cams, all based on free software, would you have paid extra for it?
This is, in fact, what I did when I switched to Fastmail. Others looking for absolute security over convenience have gravitated towards ProtonMail. I also discovered other perks to having a paid email service... like getting customer support.
Think about MSP models for a moment. Consider how they morphed into SaaS models over time. That "morphing" involved moving the data from an on-prem location to the "cloud". If you look under the hood of infra while this was going on, you see lots of innovation occurring with networking, compute resource allocation, security, storage, etc.
Now think about SaaS moving on-prem. A company has a bunch of their own infrastructure spread across both public cloud and private cloud systems. They want some of that software to have the benefits of SaaS. They want some of that software to be as secure as running it on-prem.
If we can manage to create the right software to enable it, there will be a new business model based on running someone's SaaS software on your own machines. There needs to be a way to deploy this software, and do updates and maintenance of course, but there also needs to be a way to pay for use, updates and that maintenance.
Older models of using license keys isn't very secure and doesn't scale the way SaaS services do. So, you might end up seeing a model like Splunk's, where usage defines license costs. Trouble is, that licensing engine is a pain in the ass to maintain for companies and requires what most to be considered obfuscation to make it secure, guaranteeing payments for use.
If you add cryptocurrencies to the mix, then you have a way to implement a lightweight federation across all types of infrastructure and tie it to the deployment. I won't go too far into the details of that here, but that's what I'm working on currently, and have been working on for a while.
