Went through three of these and ended up paying, and the maths was not what I expected.
The subscription is roughly the cost of a coffee a month. Over the eighteen months I spent avoiding it I lost: one evening to a conflicted-copy explosion that scattered duplicates through four years of notes, one afternoon setting up a mesh VPN, and an ongoing low-level uncertainty about whether what I was reading on the phone was current.
That last one is the part that does not show up in a comparison and is the reason I switched. Not the time, the doubt. A notes system you are slightly unsure about gets used slightly less, and I could feel myself checking the desktop before trusting the phone.
Not arguing nobody should self-manage this. Arguing that "free" should have the doubt priced into it, because for me that was the expensive line.