> I got a huge number of suggestions, of which I downloaded 16, basically all the ones that are free. In general I prefer to pay for things and am suspicious of anything that’s free on the Net, but when there are so many good free options I just don’t think there’s a business model.

This sentiment is quite odd; given that who would ever pay for a font? I get being suspicious of "free" but if you use Google, or have a gmail account. Heck even Mastodon is a free software package.

I see this a lot with older development communities; even though I've been writing code for many years; while working on an old application I was met with a prompt to purchase a license to use a library. It took me aback because while I've heard about buying and selling libraries, I've never (ever) ran into it before working at my current job. It's odd, and thankfully a dying way of making money since every dev license is at minimum $500 for a year; to $5000 annually to use those libraries in production, not even just the time to develop with them.

Never buy a font please