Open source software is free as in freedom, not as in price. Open source software does tend to cost nothing, but it's not illegal to charge money for it.
What you pay for with Redhat is mostly a support package and very long-term kernel patches.
I really like RedHat's product line as a way to move a business towards the FOSS ecosystem. I really wish they hadn't done their enshitfitcation of their products, but even after that they are still better than most enterprise alternatives.
I make sure to include OpenEL as the spec we are building on instead of RHEL. I like the architecture, just not the liability their non-foss policies put on us. We got hit by HashiCorps license change too, rough bit of time to be honest.
Who are you looking at? Suse and Rancher are two I am keeping an eye on.
We are an MSSP so it's a bit different. Since we can offload license costs to customers and as long as they prefer having this party support and it's not losing us bids we are ok.
But we have been looking at Ubuntu and CentOS previously, the main issue is how to replace Satellite.