I think it was here that we realized how ridiculous it is to pay a tremendous amount of money like that for being in a place with hardly any impact. Most campgrounds in the USA and Canada cater to RV's and such and often charge the same for tent campers. Why, probably because they can.
Anyway, after returning from our 3 day camping trip to Niagara and assessing the financial damage afterwards we decided to do things differently. We got into 'stealth camping'. Stealth meant for us at that point and time 'pitch your tent without asking anywhere you want'. Sometimes we would make actual efforts to not be seen. There are two reasons to not be seen when randomly pitching your tent somewhere, I'll get into both of them.
The first one is the law. There are places where the law doesn't allow you to camp, often within city limits and in parks there are by-laws that prohibit overnight camping. Lot's of highway rest areas have similar rules.
The second one is anyone who doesn't abide the law. When we arrived in Mexico the first time we hardly knew any Spanish and felt very uncomfortable asking people for a place to stay. Being unfamiliar with the people and it's culture we preferred most of the time to camp outside of town and as far away from people in general.
When we got into the 'wild' or 'stealth' camping we looked for resources on the internet, hoping to find a Google Map with all free campsites in the world. Now I basically call the world a free campsite.
A bit random but to color this in, I wanna mention a 'dumpsterdive-app' that we came across. In short, it's useless. If you wanna go pick through garbage you should go out to the stores, and check their dumpsters. Looking on a map will not tell you where to go or what you will find. The same can be said about maps for free campsites: Look around you and you'll find a campsite. We always did.
As we grew more experienced in traveling and camping on the side of the road we developed some changes to our techniques. Regarding the law we figured it works better to go straight to the law. Whenever touring in the USA we would simply 'confront' local police with our presence and straight out ask them where to go to pitch our tent. Instead of taking the chance of being kicked out of a park at 2 am because some over-vigilant neighbor wants to see the curfew enforced we would save everybody the trouble by asking where to go. You can see how everybody is happier that way: We would have a safe place to stay, they neighbor can stay asleep and the police can focus on more pressing matters.
In Mexico we did a similar thing, but we would leave the police out of the equation and go straight to the neighbors who never objected, for the record. As a matter of fact they would usually tell us where the better place to camp would be or in some cases wouldn't even let us camp outside but insisted that we would spend the night within the walls of their homes.
Cities can be difficult though to find a suitable campsite, but there again, ask police. If you have a problem with authoritarian figures you can also try the fire department. In Mexico there is something called Proteccion Civil, their job is literally to protect the public and guess what, cycling tourists however transient are still part of that.
On the last day of this trip the local police directed us to a homeless shelter. This is also an option of course although I personally don't like going there, simply because I think that this should be reserved for more vulnerable people.
So there are plenty of other ways to find free places to stay or camp, I haven't even mentioned Warmshowers.org which is such a great resource. Even just asking at hotels or motels if they are willing to give you a 'complementary' room works sometimes. If you don't ask and just assume the worst, that is what you're gonna get. So to get back to the pending discussion on aforementioned Facebook page, I hope this will empower anyone to just go out and camp for free when need be, I think we cyclo-tourists don't need campgrounds to be pointed out on the map because we don't need them. For us this has worked all this time especially in combination with the occasional warm shower through warmshowers.org.