Palette generators are fun and mostly free, so the interesting question is not price — it is whether the output survives contact with a real interface. Usually it does not, and the reason is measurable.
Producing a starting hue you would not have picked yourself. Coolors, Adobe Color and Huemint all do this well, and a five-swatch strip takes seconds. Where the free tools genuinely earn their place is scale generation: give one brand hue and get a consistent 50-950 ramp with even perceptual steps. Doing that by hand in HSL is tedious and produces uneven jumps, because HSL lightness is not perceptual — the same L value looks much brighter at yellow than at blue.
Contrast. A palette that looks balanced as five squares fails WCAG the moment you put text on it. The thresholds are concrete: 4.5:1 for normal body text at AA, 3:1 for large text (18.66px bold or 24px regular) and for UI component boundaries, 7:1 for AAA body text. Most generated palettes have at most one or two swatches that clear 4.5:1 against white, and pairing two mid-tone brand colours almost always lands somewhere around 2:1. Check every intended pairing before committing, not the palette in isolation.
Modern CSS supports oklch(), which separates perceptual lightness, chroma and hue. Holding L constant across hues gives you swatches that genuinely look equally bright, which is exactly what HSL fails to do. Building a ramp becomes mechanical: fix the hue, step lightness from about 0.98 down to 0.20, and taper chroma at both ends so the lightest and darkest steps do not look artificially saturated. color-mix(in oklch, …) handles blends without the muddy midpoints you get in sRGB.
:root {
--brand-h: 24; /* one number defines the family */
--brand-500: oklch(0.68 0.19 var(--brand-h));
--brand-700: oklch(0.52 0.16 var(--brand-h));
--brand-100: oklch(0.94 0.04 var(--brand-h));
--text-on-brand: oklch(0.99 0 0);
}Define semantic tokens on top of the ramp — --surface, --text, --border, --accent — and use only those in components. Rebranding then means changing one hue value instead of hunting hex codes, and dark mode means redefining the tokens rather than the components.
A palette generator saves maybe thirty minutes at the start of a project. A token system with verified contrast pairs saves hours every time the design changes, and it is the part people skip. If you are going to invest anywhere, invest in the token layer and use the generator only for the initial hue.