Hey there, I guess Ruffen included that you can use Skript for the scoreboard and Vault for the basic essentials economy or make a custom economy with just a matter of variables and as for protecting areas you need two plugins, World Edit and World Guard so, the total plugins now are 4 (Exceptionally 5 if vault is included), You can get Luck Perms for ranking which makes the total 5 (or 6), now talking about essentials we can get essentials and essentials chat which makes the total 7 now, moving on to fancy stuff we can get HolographicDisplay which makes it 8 and adding a store will help you get some donations which is Tebex or CraftingStore making the total 9 with 3 more free slots down your pocket.
To a conclusion to the plugins limit, 12 plugins capacity is enough to make a decent server and if you don't know what skript is, there's always minehut's youtube channel to help you out.
Coming over to the other hosting brand, minehut provides us with platforms to advertise your server without going through different websites to publish your server and mostly you can earn more money off minehut and even get more discord users as compared to some other free hosting brand.
And finally coming up to the free hosting, its still free, just to enhance your servers population and to use more plugins you gotta pay, it used to be even worse before where you used to have to be happy with 4 - 6 plugins without any configs,
Talking about not being able to afford packages, you always have tebex or craftingstore to help you out with earning sufficient money for a month or two of slots and plugin limit or you can always vote for a month and get more than the amount of credits needed for the 720/month package.