It's bad enough that it's not included already, since it's very standard, but US$150 is outrageous. It would take them ten minutes to fix it.
All they need to do is recompile PHP and add the following flags:
--with-ttf --with-freetype-dir=/usr
Unfortunately there is no other way around this (apart from switching to another web provider).
General help
Translating dates to Spanish and .png files
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