What is the difficulty in getting away from gmail?
I did it a few years ago and I simply signed up for Fastmail and had gmail forward all email there. It forwards to a specific e-mail address so I can see if there are still people/companies that use the old email address.
The painful part was going through all my accounts to update the e-mail, but you can do it in stages if you follow the above.
- SES was a big one. There was no affordable alternative at my (not big, not small) scale.
- I'm still waning myself personally of GMail. That dependency took decades to build and it will take years for all ties to sever.