you don't need to pay to get any distro, if you are planning to use suse you could try opensuse, if you want red hat try using fedora core
but like some have mentioned above the best way to start using linux may be installing ubuntu, there is a real good guide at
http://ubuntuguide.org/, now it is easier than ever to install it and you can just try it as a livecd, i say give it a shot!