I follow a couple of binaries groups, so I do pay for Giganews. Aside from that, the free server I used a while back was unreliable. It missed a lot of posts. The paid server would show say, 100 posts in a given time period, the free server would have about 90.
Perhaps other free servers are better, but my initial experience with two of them sucked.
There are probably others paid servers as good, but cheaper than the
2.99 for Giganews, but I'm too lazy to risk making the change.