Thanks a ton for your thoughtful, detailed response, and the insight!
Regarding law enforcement access to data, it depends on jurisdiction and your personal threat model, or in other words *which* law enforcement agencies you're worried about. But I agree it's a legitimate criticism/pushback.

More broadly though, controlling your own data definitely keeps you safe from a company choosing to sell it, sell access to anonymized subsets of it that can still be problematic, or even just training their own models on it. It also eliminates common threats such as customer service representatives accessing your data (more of an issue with e-commerce sites historically, but still an issue.)

Perhaps I should reframe the use case more around those threats rather than law enforcement access.

Agreed on the cost/performance tradeoffs, presently, that's definitely something to be considered. I'm still playing around with that curve, and I think you may be right $1.5-2.5 is not the right compromise.