spy phone monitoring

I am very discouraged trying to find phone a monitoring program that will work, without ripping me off. I have spent some money on this project, in fact, i need to try to get refunded for mspy now that i know the phone i want to view needs to be "rooted"? Apparently that's a process too complicated for me to want to tackle, which is very frustrating. Their ad never mentioned that, like many others, and i've spent days researching.

My question to the forum is two-fold: First, I'd love to find a reliable "free" program to monitor a phone, if not free, reasonably priced; and secondly, many claims are made about not needing the actual phone to program, "remotely" setting it up. Is this just a pipe-dream, which seems more likely, or is their some credibility to it. I'd love to know for sure once and for all. Any advice is greatly appreciated.