Have never used free dyndns services myself. But if I would have to choose one right now I would give ipv64.net a try. Dennis has some excellent (german) YT tutorials and constantly improves his services.
IMO, the best free option is freedns.afraid.org. The biggest downside of that one is that you have to login a couple times a year (IIRC?) to keep it active. I actually still use this even though I have a paid domain, I just CNAME my real domains to the afraid dynamic name. That was easier than changing the config every time I become unhappy with my domain registrar and have to reconfigure everything after swapping.
I also use this, and it works great. Another downside is that when using the free service, others can just use subdomains of your registered domains. You can always deny it, but you have to do it manually. With the premium subscriptions you can prevent that automatically for a number of domains, depending on how much you pay.
I’d recommend getting your own domain name and using a full DNS service that has an API. deSEC.io is free and well supported by common tools like ddclient, but you can also use their API directly with one curl command.
Or you can use your registrar’s DNS servers if they have an API, that would also be free most likely since it would be included in the service.
gandi.net has excellent DNS services included with domains but they’ve recently pumped up their renewal prices and now you have to dig a bit through their offer to find something below $20. There’s .fr, .gdn, .gr, .in and .uk domains (including .me.uk).
I’d recommend an EU country like .fr or .gr if you’re an EU citizen because then their registry data falls under GDPR, plus most EU ccTLD registries are private by default. Otherwise .in also has good whois privacy and is the cheapest.
I’ve had issues with duckdns failing over the past year or so (their server going down - outages). I guess it could be something on my side, but it happened often enough that I switched to my own domain. Haven’t had any outages since, and I can use subdomains now for routing.
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