Its disgraceful to start charging for I cloud... Users are forced into paying for it.

Apple offered you 25 GB of free storage for a year if you were using MobileMe. I suppose you have had enough time to migrate your files to another cloud storage if you don't want to pay for iCloud, so now you will have to pay as any other user.

You can downgrade to 5 GB of storage, pay for 25 GB or use another cloud service. If you want iCloud to store data, I recommend you to use another cloud service or get an external drive

There is no charge for an iCloud account. Apple only charges for storage space above the free 5 GBs.