Quick Story.
Little Pizza joint in my small town. They went the cheap, lazy, or ignorant route (no shame or judgement) and decided to go with a free website by the Webs builder. That’s all fine and dandy, until webs went out of business. Now, not only is their website gone. But their “.webs.com” domain is now totally dead and inaccessible. No way to redirect that for future traffic. To make matters worse, they printed this now dead domain on all of their signage.
So now you have to replace all signage, a costly mistake that could have been avoided for $15.
All this said to make a point, if you intend to take your business seriously its imperative that you own your domain. Invest the small amount for peace of mind, trust me. We are in the digital age, start acting like it.