For Mathematica, the graphical outputs and the vast pallette of functions is truly marvelous. IMO it feels a much superior product to Maple & MATLAB. If only they could make it bit more affordable to individual hobbyists. If I remember right, it is $200 per year (incl. tax). That does pinch the pockets a bit, specially if you are from a developing country.

EDIT: A thought that comes to my mind is that Jetbrains products are similarly placed in pricing. But YoY costs actually go down. Furthermore, you are allowed to retain the last subscribed version which you paid in full. You can use the same license on all your machines/VMs. This is not the case with Wolfram products. The pricing stays the same if you want the point updates to be fetched. You cannot use the product if your subscription ends and individual licenses are limited to 1 (or 2?) machines. This does hurt!

There's a free tier of Wolfram Cloud. Mathematica is also bundled with the Raspberry Pi Raspbian distribution.

The Wolfram engine can also be used for free: https://www.wolfram.com/engine/

It can be used as Jupyter kernel: https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter