Whats the most affordable setup for VPS (here obviously) + domain + emails?

This is as you can see isn’t a technical question, but more of an advice question.

As DigitalOcean doesn’t provide domain or email hosting I’m curious what others use for this?

My personal current setup is 3 domains plus a Business Plan web hosting at HostGator, this includes unlimited email and storage and some other things. The domains point here, so I don’t use any of the storage included in the plan, only what I have here in my droplets. This costs me about $19/month, plus 3x $12 for the domains. So about $22 a month which pretty far from very expensive. But it does feel unnecessary since I don’t use any of their storage.

I’m thinking of moving the domains to Google instead which would only be the price of the domains and have email forwarding to a gmail account. which would cost me about $3 a month instead. But responding from a Gmail when someone contacted me on a business like domain doesn’t look professional in my opinion.

What are your experiences with this? What setup are you using and how much does it cost? I’m sure I’m not the only one that would prefer putting my money into a more powerful droplet than unnecessary services from other hosting companies!