There were only three goalies this year who played any significant amount of time making 800k or less that signed their contract as a UFA.
Carter Hutton, Jonas Gustavsson, and Curtis McElhinney. None of those is particularly good. Chances are if we didn't sign Raanta we'd be going with a guy of that quality or have paid even more for a backup goalie.
The other internal options are Hellberg or Skapski for ~650k. Skapski was awful this year in the ECHL. Hellberg was reasonably good in the AHL.
What would be your preferred option if we didn't sign Raanta? Roll with Hellberg for 20ish games and hope he is capable? And then have essentially nobody behind him as extra depth? The UFA goalies this year are like..Scrivens (awful), Khuodin (meh), Stalock (awful), Johnson (going to get over 1M), Enroth (will get over 1M), Montoya (probably will get over 1M0, Gustavsson again, Zatkoff (wouldn't mind that), Hutton, Lindback (awful). Not the most appealing group.