I think if you're the kind of person to have an email address on their domain for their printer, you shouldn't feel bad about putting some effort into hosting your email outside of Gmail.

Wow. Why is it so much?

I saw the $6/month per user plan, which would be $216 for three humans.

Is that a massively discounted (80%) introductory price?

There is a $30/person tier, maybe they are using something that requires that? For myself I'm doing a data export then I'll purge the backup accounts and automated email accounts (for email alerts for self-hosted stuff I have home@mydomain.com). I'll move all my alert sending to AWS SES and get away with $6/mo for myself.

$6 is the real price and not introductory. Even the most expensive standard plan (Business plus) is $18/month and would be $648 year for 3 ppl. Not sure where they got $1000.

You saw correct, but user != human. User = email address. Two NASes, a bug tracker, a CI/CD server, printer, a catch all for either of two domains, it adds up. The combined disk usage is about 3GB, well under the limit for a single user.

the $6/mo isn't discounted. cosmotic has 14+ email accounts for some reason.

If all you need from GSuite is email, then hosting yourself with https://mailinabox.email/ is an alternative that worked for me, until I realised that https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ on a yearly plan was cheaper than the cheapest hetzner VM I could get for hosting it myself.

Leaving a $6 per user Google service which includes email for a $5 per user Fastmail service which is just email would be an odd cost-saving measure.