Google Suite is something like $5 / month per domain name so offering that as a free feature would be a pretty big deal.
And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.
Here are three less expensive email options for you:
1. get a VM and install exim/postfix 2. OpenSRS https://opensrs.com/services/hosted-email/ 3. AWS workmail https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
> And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.
These inboxes would be for your custom domain that you registered, not @cloudflare.com for everyone. I used that for his because it sounds like he works there.
Yours would be x13@whateverdomainyouregistered.com.
In this case I forwarded that email to my gmail account and it all works, but it's not perfect.
In either case, having at least email forwarding or an inbox is essential for a lot of common things you'd want to do on a domain. Forwarding works ok to avoid $60 / year for Google's offerings but has some limitations.
This is coming at it from the POV of just setting up a VPS to host some sites and wanting to accept email from your domain name without paying any more than what the domain cost to register.
I think this use case is super common, especially on HN.
No one thought Let's Encrypt would step up and offer a top tier free SSL solution. If it can be done for SSL, it can be done for real inboxes. :)