it's not.

You need to answer yourself 2 questions:

-do you want to play ninja collection?

-do you want to be competitive in pvp?

If you want to collect ninjas then its a long term contribution, as even though game offers quite a lot of freebies (for example this week 8 or 9 free naruto sosp frags) it takes few months to complete whole ninja when you actively redeem free frags and then buy the remaining ones. If you'll just collect free frags and dont really spend to finish them off (thats what I mostly do), then youll find yourself trying to finish some ninjas for over a year.

If you want to be competitive in pvp: you need to find a certain bracket of players you'd want to compete with. This is one and only way you could say you are "competitive", as for even small active spenders FTP are just meatbags. If you aim at the very top, let me stop you right there. Better buy a real house or new Porsche than spend equivalent on virtual currency to get top1.

Also, have no delusions. You will never be able to compete with someone who spends as long as both players play regularly, literally never. Recharging 6k, spending it on frogs and monthly cards is equivalent of roughly 20k coupons. Per month, just because they paid. Ammount of time for ftp to collect this ammount is over 5months, and you need to consider that person who spent will also get this much just by playing the game. And get even more, because money invested into the game snowball account's progress. On top of that, bigger spenders get all those new ninjas for "free" as a bonus for recharging. So lets say John Doe recharges 30k, recruits 20k ninja and gets 20k of items just by recharging. Then he can change those 30k ingots into 100k coupons over 5months. Overall he gets 20k ninja, 20k items and 100k in coupons, as well as 20k cp for doing daily activities like everybody. Thats total worth of 160k cp vs you, who over those 5 months got only 20k. Got the point?

If you like the naruto franchise and you want to play the game for fun, by all means its great. As i mentioned, you get some freebies, doing dailies gives you a lot of ingame currency (sun/moon/ninja coins) to trade for something of your choice, so you have a sense of semi progress. But if you lack patience (and patience is single most important trait of a ftp naruto player), this game is not ftp friendly at all. In any aspect, as it will most likely cause you frustration as you can neither recruit anything in a short span of time, nor be competitive to have fun with winning pvp fights.