Pubky itself does not require pay. The protocols are all open source and p2p-capable. Our instance of the pubky.app web platform (which is also open source) has a bot gateway to prevent spammers from using up all our resources on our homeserver.
You can run your own homeserver, or ask someone to run one that does not have bot protection.
Pubky is in fact extremely more P2P-capable and censorship-resistant than Nostr.
https://medium.com/pubky/mainline-dht-censorship-explained-b62763db39cb
But even putting that aside, being "more P2P than Nostr" is not a high bar. Again, if your system is meaningfully P2P "using up all of the resources of your homeserver" shouldn't be a concern. If you're making something P2P you should be competing and comparing with BitTorrent, not Nostr. And "1GB storage, 1MB/s speed limit" (after paying actual money no less!) does not look flattering in that comparison.
And where does the storage limit even come from in an actual P2P system? That sounds like you're actively forbidding users from hosting each other's data more than you'd allow them to. Some decentralization.
Nostr does not have such limitations!