While true restoring privacy has implicit costs. Maybe the author shouldn't have explicitly mentioned money as one of them. I find costs such as "paying more" because you aren't participating in the ad-tracking carousel. Opportunity costs such as opting out of referral codes/links that save 5% on checkout etc. Cost of time, by taking the longer route to access a page in a cleaner non-tracked form. Etc.

Most of the tools that attempt to restore privacy are free open community-driven projects such as pi-hole. Maybe the observed distinction is a marker of class, but money isn't nearly important in the equation for most privacy-seeking folk.