If you are just embarking on researching your family tree and find it irksome or expensive to use subscription services to search the birth, marriage and death indexes, it helps to remember two things:
The first is that those of us that researched in the old index books had to shift 1800 volumes for a single surname over 150 years. The books weighed upwards of 5 kg. I make that about nine tons of books, and then there was all the time and train fares. One upside was that the old, hideous Victorian typeface used in these indexes could be examined close up, and errors minimised, whereas some of the fiche copies make transcription difficult.
The second thing to remember is that as more and more public and statutory records are moving online, and in many cases behind subscription paywalls, free resources do still exist. One example of this is “freebmd” a volunteer project to index and publish on line the England and Wales b,m,d indexes. It is as the name implies, free to use. Subscription services such Ancestry.com and Findmypast will still show you something even if you have no subscription. Often as not, just a total of hits, but in many cases rather more. This can sometimes give you a lead for extending your search or buying pay as you go credits.
Having in recent years found online sources from around the world, online is clearly the way forward. However, there are and probably will be for a long time vast volumes of records that have not been transcribed. If you don’t find it online, it does not mean it does not exist!