It doesn't cost money, you could just pay to remove ads. Unless you want all the super fancy features with premium. I bought sync for reddit years ago but I'm sticking with the regular non-premium with Lemmy.

Sync isn't polished for lemmy yet, so yeah, there are a few rough edges. Having said that, usually a bad experience is because you didn't customize it to your liking. There is likely a setting for any UI gripe you may have had. There is even a search feature for setting because it's so customizable.

I think a lot of the love for it is that sync was arguably the best android Reddit app for a long time. People like myself have become very comfortable with sync on Reddit, and sync for Lemmy is basically the same thing we are all so comfortable with.

I looked at some of the other alternatives and they just didn't feel as good to me, but I have also been using sync almost daily for years.