GNUCash value proposition

[Steve Cohen]

I have stumbled into the world of GNUCash, which I never heard of until
yesterday, over frustration with another forced and unwanted upgrade of
Quicken.  I use Quicken to track my personal finances, including
investements (which I'm not too rigourous with because I have a
financial guy who sends me the offical statements upon which my taxes
are based).  I mainly want to pay bills, keep a rough running total of
my net worth, and be able to download my transactions in banks and
credit cards to a central place.

I know my way around Linux, Open Source and GitHub and am not unwilling
to get my hands dirty with technical details.  It would be one more nail
in the coffin of my Windows use, which would make me happy.  And as I
near retirement, the thought of possibly even working on such a project
is not unappealing to me.

But as I began thinking about ways to move from Quicken to GNUCash, the
following obstacle is holding me back:
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settings#Chase It
will apparently cost me $9.95 a month just to be able to automatically
download my transaction data from Chase Bank, which is more than Quicken
would cost me if I upgraded every year (which I don't).  Possibly plus
connection fees to the other financial instituations, (brokerages,
pension accounts, etc.) that I now connect to via Quicken.

So my question is, and please don't take this as a hostile question, is
whether it is correct that in making the jump from Quicken I will have
to pay the banks these high connection fees to use OFX?   If it is, I
might just opt to stick with Quicken, which I'm not crazy about. Or am I
missing something?  While there is documentation that is as recent as
this year, there are also documents dated 2006 or 2008, so I'm not clear
about the prospects and viability of this project.

What do GNUCash users do?  Pay the ten bucks a month?  Give up on OFX
and automatic downloading, or download data from the banks' websites and
manually import into GNUCash?  Or something else?

Thanks.

Steve Cohen