Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also host your zone with Hurricane Electric and skip the part about paying a small yearly fee to Google.
there's no cost to google besides the registration fee, if it's your zone, you're paying that fee anyways. The only way to not pay a fee is to go through a free dyndns provider that you have to use a hostname off of their zone.
Is the DNS free, even if you use other registrar than Google?
I have some domains with country-specific tlds, and I'm using small registrars there. he.net is free even in this case.