I think none of us is surprised that the free lunch is now over and that this could not last ad infinitum.
Google One is a good deal, but if you're not afraid of doing a minimal amount of manual work then there are other storage services out there that offer good price per GB.
Most of them are compatible with S3 buckets - Backblaze B2 or Wasabi are good examples. Any sort of contents can be synced to these buckets using third party apps. A quick Google search brings up FolderSync which looks decent.
After all the issues I’ve had with other providers, including self hosting. I’m now just transferring all my photos to B2 with the photosync app. It’s working fantastically well.
I haven’t found a way to get all my google photos out though.
The only way to get the original quality photos is by using Google Takeout. Before Google made changes to Drive, you could use rclone (https://rclone.org/) to sync originals. That no longer seems to be the case, unfortunately.
Google One is a good deal, but if you're not afraid of doing a minimal amount of manual work then there are other storage services out there that offer good price per GB.
Most of them are compatible with S3 buckets - Backblaze B2 or Wasabi are good examples. Any sort of contents can be synced to these buckets using third party apps. A quick Google search brings up FolderSync which looks decent.