Now, you can do everything for free that I mention. You could get a free subdomain through .co.cc, free hosting through various places, setup your own free autoresponder and participate on free forums. However, with free accounts, the service can be taken away at any time, and without any need for the services to justify their actions. For example, many will simply discontinue your services because you get too much traffic.
Also, you do not want to spend a lot of time with search engine optimization on a domain that may disappear one day. Likewise, you do not want to build a huge mailing list only to have it disappear.
Since the monthly costs are so low, I strongly recommend at least having your own domain, hosting, and autoresponder. Altogether, this will cost between $5 and $29 per month, depending on which options you choose. If you join a community (strongly recommended), this will roughly double the cost, but save you tons of time in the short-run. Review the Investing 101 section to see if a method subscription is right for you.
Compared with offline businesses, the start-up costs for the Internet Marketer are almost nil, and once you get some traffic, they quickly pay for themselves.