A former coworker is, for some reason, incredibly proud of our medium-sized medical group having a legacy block. He takes such a proprietary interest that he became a former coworker when he quit, among other reasons, after our board voted to give a /23 to another group in our industry.
I'm not quite old enough to have been able to get a free /24 with no recurring fees but I'll happily use the provider-independent /24 I got in the RIPE area some years ago. Only costs $150/year to my sponsoring LIR and they give me a /44 of IPv6 addresses included.