Technically it still costs money, but there is a way to actually let Google pay you to pay the monthly fees for Google One.

Sounds complicated? it’s really not! All you need to do is to signup for Google Rewards (their surveys platform), answer some surveys and use the rewards balance (that’s paid to your Google Play account) to pay for Google One.

Here are the steps in more details.

Download the Google Rewards app

Go to Google Opinion Rewards home page and download the app from the relevant App Store (YES! you can do it even if you have iPhone)

Answer Surveys

Google will occasionally send you surveys, You need to make sure you answer these within 24 hours, otherwise they will expire.

You can’t control the frequency of the surveys, but from my experience the more you allow Google to know about yourself (like location) the more surverys you will get.

Most of the surveys will pay 10 – 30 cents, but they usually take just a few seconds to answer.

Once you answer a survey the reward is added to your Google Play balance,

You can review your rewards history by opening the “hamburger” menu on the top-left and taping Rewards history.

As you can see if banked up quite a few $$$, though it is over the last few years.

Set you Google Play balance as the primary method of payment

On Android:

• Go to the Play Store app
• Click on your user icon (top right corner)
• Click Payments and subscriptions
• Click Payment methods
• Select Google Play Balance as the default one. Note that you will need to have some available balance there to select it.

Sign up for Google One

Go to Google One and subscribe to one of their plans.

I doubt (if you have just started using Google Rewards) that you will have enough balance to pay for the annual subscription, so why don’t you go and subscribe on a monthly basis.

Enjoy your Google One for free on Android and iPhone

Now every month, assuming you will have enough balance on Google Play from the surveys, your Google One subscription (and any other payments in Google Play) will be deducted from the Google Play “account” and not from your other “real” payment methods.

I was using the Google Play available balance to pay for Google One as well as a few other apps and books like Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is not on my list of Books, Movies and other items mentioned in Tim Ferris Blog and Podcast (because I need to update :-))

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Update 2020: Here is how to do it with Zoho Mail.
When I started working on my new side-project

alinks4u.com (allows you to easily create Amazon Affiliate links) I bought the domain from Google Domains and needed to set up sending and receiving email for this domain. Below are the steps required to do it and they are inspired by this article.

Receiving Emails

Create a new Gmail account (Optional) You can continue using your existing, personal account if you wish to, but I preferred to create a new one

Set up Mailgun

Sign up

Mailgun allows you (among a lot of other things) to send emails via API and SMTP,  as well as set up “routes” for incoming rules. Both of these functionalities we will use here. Their free tier allows to send up to 10000 emails a months, which was more then enough for me.

Create a new domain

Go to Domains and click Add New Domain Enter your domain name. You can disregard the warning since we are actually using this (root) domain (and not any subdomain to send and receive emails. After clicking Add Domain you will be shown the DNS records that you will to update. You can go back to these DNS records anytime, by going to Domains and clicking the domain you’ve just added and expanding the Domain Verification & DNS section

Set up forwarding

Mailgun routes are basically rules for incoming emails. You can set up forwarding to other email addresses or to webhooks (we will use the former) Go to Routes and click Create Route

If you have only one domain defined in Mailgun you can use the Catch All rule or in case you have multiple domains create a Match Recipient one like the one below (off course replace it with your own domain name :-))

Configure DNS in Google Domains

Since, as mentioned I got my domain from Google Domains I’ll show how to configure the DNS records mentioned above in the Google Domains panel, but the steps will be quite similar for any other domain name registrar/hosting In your Google Domains panel click the DNS link

Scroll down to Custom Resource Records and add the DNS records as advised by Mailgun. One thing worth mentioning when adding TXT records surround them with double-quotes (like “record value”) This how my records looked like The DNS settings can take some time to propagate (from a couple of minutes to hours:-)),but you can check the status by going to Mailgun > Domains >your domain > expanding the Domain Verification & DNS section. If the DNS was configured property you will see a green tick near the required entries.

Now all your emails will be forwarded to your Gmail address, the one you’ve specified in the Mailgun route. You can try that by sending an email from your personal email account to some address in your new domain for ex: admin@example.com or support@exampe.com. As you remember we used wildcard in the route, so any email (in your domain) will work.

Sending Emails

We will be setting up an account alias in Gmail. To do that we will need SMTP settings from Mailgun. In Mailgun go to Domains and click your domain. At the top of the page, you will see a Domain Information section which has all the info that we need

Configure Gmail In your (optionally) new Gmail account Go to Settings > Accounts and Import.

Under Send mail as: section click Add another email address

In the wizard enter the name that you want to appear as the sender name and the email address

Configure SMTP settings based on what was suggested in the Domain Information section (on Mailgun), use port 485 Then Gmail will send an email with a validation code. It will be sent to the email you’ve specified in the first step of this wizard, but since we have set up a route in Mailgun it will receive it in the current email account (the one that you following the wizard in). So paste your validation code and you are good to go Now you can try sending an email as the created Alias to some other email address and you will receive it properly With all the validations, bells and whistles    I hope you will find this post useful, Feel free to comment or to reach out to me @IlyaReshet

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