I submit websites everyday. But it has become almost absolete that I no longer charge for the service. However, I recommend that people still submit, especially new websites. If you have good links then the search engines will find your sites. Yet for new sites submission is a must.
There is no need to ever submit your site to a search engine like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Just build some inbound links and they will find it.
And how long will it take to find them? It can vary, especially since different sites get crawled at different rates (some are crawled frequenty, some rarely). Which is why it's still a good idea to submit them directly, in conjunction with your link building campaign.