that is an issue across all tech

Monetization is absolutely not an issue across all tech. We're just lazy and don't try variant of easy choices.

I cited three examples, all of which are used by a lot of intelligence professionals (gee, wonder why) that are very specifically not monetized.

1. Proton mail - has a free variant, the paid one is not a monetized thing but rather a subscription like any other.

2. Signal - completely free, though as a nonprofit they're interested in donations (sort of like Wikimedia). I'll probably send them some money this year; they support a lot of dissidents and people in trouble, so they can stay in comms with liberators/lawyers/freedom oriented journalists.

3. DuckduckGo - search engine you can run as the default instead of Google, but which is private and does not store and track your searches/info, and gives pretty good results.

All of you should consider these solutions. Your data, if you use Google, is not your data. I can't be any more blunt than that.

Here's some others:

OpenOffice, LibreOffice, basically anything from the Free Software Foundation, various deployments of Linux. There are probably many more, but not quite my area of expertise. I've used several and they're perfectly functional.