[jasondoty]

If you're not going to make money off it, my opinion is you can use cracked VSTs without any concerns of "is it right".

In fact, as with a lot of pirated soft/media the experience is superior. Licensing and DRM of music software is a headache - dongles, software centers and other bloat. Scene groups like R2R even optimize performance and patch out bugs in addition to cracking protections, making their releases superior than that of the original developers.

Otherwise have a look at Splice rent-to-own plugin licensing.