I think it is less about paying than understanding what it is actually doing with your files. I know a few reasonably intelligent people who could not tell you

I think it is less about paying than understanding what it is actually doing with your files. I know a few reasonably intelligent people who could not tell you what their paid iCloud is Apple did create a nice little automatic revenue generator. It forces you to pay apple, disabled backups (with scary delete messages), or trying to navigate the backup interface to cull things to stay withing the 5 gb limit.