You cannot say that C++ is expensive because it is just a programming language. Some compilers for C++ may be expensive, but the language does not cost anything. That's like saying that english is expensive because there is a certain english class that you can go to that costs a lot of money.

If you need a C++ compiler, first people really need to know what operating system you are running before they can make any suggestions. In this thread there have been suggestions for more than one os, so that is not so much a problem for you, but in future, tell us what os you are running.

If you are running any windows operating system then I would recommend bloodshed dev-c++ (available from http://www.bloodshed.net as someone else said above), and if you are running a unix based operating system, I would recommend gcc (for c) and g++ (for c++). You would normally have these installed in any case.

Dev-c++ itself isn't the compiler, it is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which is basically a text editor that will carry out many of the tasks needed to compile and run your program without you having to do them. For this reason, I think if you aren't used to using consoles (like the linux console or dos-prompt) I think you should head over to bloodshed.net.

Hope that helped.

ac