In my experience Windows users don't care about the statically linked part

What they care about is having an executable and not needing a zip with dlls

And that is trivially achievable by bundling the dlls into the exe file

Also trivially achievable by making an installer instead of shipping separate files. People are really used to that pattern.

You do not have to pay before your first sale.

And $500 is laughable small compared to developer salary. If it saves you half a day of work, you are covered

There is a huge gulf between saving a half a day of work versus _having_ $500 to spend on a tool that would save you that half day of work.