While those prices seem pretty good for first world countries, many of the people in my country don't make more than $1000 per month, so it'd still be a substantial investment.

There's nothing wrong with consumer hardware for homelabs (except for ECC RAM sometimes not being supported), for example, i use Athlon 200GE's for mine because of the 35W TDP and however much RAM i can buy, with some SeaGate HDDs for storage.

That's definitely enough to run some virtualization, though nowadays i mostly use Docker Swarm (while K3S would also run with little issues on that hardware).

Of course, there are also the option of looking at alternatives to expensive cloud vendors: not everyone needs AWS, GCP or Azure, which are better suited for businesses. Some alternatives that come to mind are:

- Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/

- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

- Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing

- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

Personally, i use an even cheaper host, called Time4VPS, which is in Lithuania: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (disclaimer: affiliate link), which i've been using for a few years. Of course, using something like BackupPC https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ to make incremental backups with rsync is also useful in the case of all of these services.