You would expect paid tools are somewhat good, but some of them are particularly good and/or good value for money:
Excellent IDE for PHP and web development. Subscription $53+/year, with perpetual license fallback. Web: jetbrains.com.
Music composition studio. Fruity edition for $99, with all future upgrades included. Web: image-line.com.
E-mail client and PIM. If you don't want Outlook and Thunderbird is not enough for you (e.g. you use Exchange). $50. Web: emclient.com.
File manager by Christian Ghisler. ~$48. Web: ghisler.com.
For some great tools you don't have to pay anything even for commercial use and therefore deserves a shoutout:
Bitmap graphics editor. Rick Brewster intended it as a replacement for MS Paint, but he continued working on it and created a capable yet lightweight photo editor. Web: getpaint.net.
Text and code editor by Jan Fiala. Web: pspad.com.
Lightweight yet amazingly capable music player by Un4seen. Web: support.xmplay.com.
GUI for Git. Requires free Atlassian ID account. Web: sourcetreeapp.com.
Tool for enhancing mouse experience in Windows. Web: highrez.co.uk.
There are several great open source tools, that deserves a shoutout:
Despite it's not an IDE, but “just” a code editor, Microsoft made it VERY capable thanks to great architecture and various plugins.
Database manager by Ansgar Becker, formerly MySQL-Front. Not just for MySQL and MariaDB, but supports also Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and even SQLite. Web: heidisql.com.
And if you look for a single PHP script to do similar job, there's Adminer.
Vector graphics editor. Web: draw.io.
Audio wave editor. Web: audacityteam.org.
Map viewer for web. Web: leafletjs.com.
Password manager, with many useful plugins. Web: keepass.info.
SSH and telnet client. Web: putty.org.
SCP and (S)FTP client by Martin Prikryl. Web: winscp.net.
Lightweight PDF reader. Web: sumatrapdfreader.com.
Clock replacement for Windows. GitHub: White-Tiger/T-Clock.
Multiplatform alternative to Total Commander. Web: doublecmd.sourceforge.io.
Backup software by Zenju, with emphasis on speed. Web: filefreesync.org.
I had a little more time, so instead doing just incremental changes I was able to go knee-deep into some of those excremental ones :-)