I'd say the proven good ones are Proton, Mullvad, and IVPN.
Windscribe has really improved a lot and is worth considering. Still probably worth waiting for Freshscribe infrastructure before considering over the 3 I mentioned above.
Nym and Obscura are up and comers worth looking at. Nym is a decentralized VPN and Obscura has partnered with Mullvad to offer a true double hop (ie one in where both hops are not owned by the same entity).
To each their own.
I think its reasonable that a one man dev team wants a bit of money for their time. They gave good reasons as to why and as others have said you could compile it yourself. I just don't know how and am a bit intimidated by the tutorial.
To me, personally, paying for this type of program when my use case is very casual, isn't worth it to me.