If you look at the tech of Soviets vs Ost. Ost most certainly gets stuff for free.
Ostheer gets access to grenades, LMGs, fausts, panzergrenadiers, an amazing machine gun, sniper, mortar all for the amazing price of 130MP (thanks you bonus 50MP starting resources for OST!). Meanwhile as Soviets you spend 160MP (no bonus for soviet scrubs) and get access to... No grenades, no weapon upgrades, no AT nades, a shit machine gun that is somehow 260MP, mortar, AT gun. Or they get penals/scoutcar/sniper.
If that doesn't qualify as 'getting stuff for free' then nothing can ever qualify as getting stuff for free.
I don't have my own sheet at hand at the moment, so I'll just quote StuG's post instead.
https://www.coh2.org/topic/96750/redirect-thread-faction-teching-and-timing/post/770422
Haven't rechecked his maths but I think it is correct since I did not compain back then.
It's slightly outdated since the discussion is from August last year, so especially OST T4 got a bit of a rework. But in general it still holds true:
For tech to mediums, healing (or OKW T2 engineers), grenades and weapon upgrades all factions pay approximately the same in fuel. MP is a bit different but MP economy is also way more complex.
I'm not going into this cherrypicking "OST gets the building for X MP" etc as this is forced by faction and game design (btw unless they changed it or StuG is wrong, the MP starting difference between OST and SOV seems to be 30, not 50; also you neglected the 40 FU pricetag on BP1 so that PGrens don't come right out of the gate).
Instead we should have a look at which times and for how much investment a faction can reach certain milestones like "4 mainlines and a support weapon on the field", "viable unlock of weapon upgrades" etc. This would give a better impression of when a faction has an advantage. OKW for example pays quite a bit for their full tech. The main difference though is that they have to make their MP investment comes comparatively late, which allows their early game pressure.
If you want to compare faction costs, do it reasonably and don't retell actual faction differences by design.