Good lord, with so many free font sites out there, who has to pay for one?
That depends on what you need it for.
There are some good ones, but most online fonts are of horrible quality. They aren't correctly kerned, hinted or have no opentype features like ligatures or smallcaps. Most even have no added weights whatsoever; you'll have to use the 'bold' or 'italic' function in your software to approximate them -- which nearly always look horrid.
If you look for free online fonts, make sure you try them out in a word processor first. Look if the letters are spaced correctly -- that the words don't break up into pieces. Look if they still look good at multiple sizes -- most fonts only look good at a certain corps, for example 22pt.
Also, make sure (in the case of a non-decorative font) that there are multiple weights, so you have the option of variation without resorting to your software to emulate it for you.
In the case of a script font, make sure there are ligatures and the opentype script that makes the letters fit together perfectly in different letter combinations.
Last but not least, look at the license of your 'free' font. Most 'free' fonts that are good aren't actually free. They may only be used for non-commercial purposes (which is somewhat ambiguous), only for a set number of days or only if you send your creation to the font author, whatever the including license specifies.
It's a professional craft, designing fonts -- and it's not just so those people have something to put on their business cards. It's a tiring process, usually taking months at the very least for a small font family, from the moment the first sketches are made up to the moment the opentype programming is complete.
It's just like webdesign: quite a few people dabble in a bit of Photoshop and HTML. They 'make' a website in Dreamweaver or Frontpage for a family member's small business for a small fee. That doesn't make them webdesigners and it doesn't make their creations websites. It might look a bit like one, but underneath it usually doesn't validate, doesn't have semantically correct use of elements and has no browser-compatibility. It usually also looks like something my dog ate, has a horribly unintuitive and unusable way of navigating ("because it looks cool and I found a free script") and crashes any browser you throw at it because the javascript's full of infinite loops. Not the mention the fact that it doesn't do anything for the business it's supposed to represent.
And I can say the same for "made in the attic" corporate identities, "made in the basement" dance tracks and yes, "made in Fontographer" font design. There are professionals and there are hobbyists. While there are a few good free fonts, most of them are horrible.
If you want an example of excellent free fonts, look
here.
Amarillo is close, but not perfect.
You are right about that.
