The “free storage” was news to me when I heard they were ending it. Turns out this was only for images saved compressed (‘High’ vs Original quality). Since I don’t want my images altered at all I never used that option, and the change is not significant. I don’t recommend that you let Google apply lossy compression to your images to save space, either, unless your photos are not very important.
The earlier Google Pixel phones included free unlimited original quality backup of photos/videos, but in recent phone generations they dropped that, and they also confirmed future Pixel phones won't even get free unlimited compressed backups.
