Uh, what "low cost and/or free software" has "high costs"?
Generally speaking, if one sells one's product at a price less than the cost of manufacture, one goes broke in short order.
First, there are several free newsreaders available for Windows, including Free Agent. Gravity is quite nice. Google "free Windows newsreader" and you should get a number of hits. Second, this discussion started by someone complaining of not having the 30 bucks to pay for full Agent. That is hardly an onerous price. Third, if it's Microsoft that's bugging you, they provide a number of ways to get their software at very good discounts if you know the right hoops to jump through. For a thousand bucks or so you can get _everything_ they make other than games and hardware, all with multiple licenses. For 300 you can get ten seats of everything likely to be useful for a small business, with three shipments of new or updated stuff in the next year and after that for 200 a year you can continue to get the quarterly shipments. You can get many of their developer tools for a free download. If you're a legitimate nonprofit you can get XP for 25 bucks for the first seat and 18 for each of the next 50--more than that contact Microsoft directly.
And if that's too much for you then there is Open Source.