My 23 years with Plusnet have been fine
OK, so the title stretches the truth, but, I started using Free-Online dial-up in 1998, it was an 0845 number and you didn't pay any monthly fees. I stopped using their dial-up in 2000, but the e-mail account I set up still works now. It was down for a day during this outage but it's been OK since yesterday. Maybe they fixed Free-Online accounts first?! It's not my primary e-mail address of course, and I don't use their outgoing SMTP.
So I haven't paid anything to Plusnet for 21 years. Who says there's no such thing as free?
Also, free e-mail as a perk from your ISP isn't something people want any more.