The initial cost of the printer is not going to be your biggest cost. You will also spend $$ on various small tools or even furniture, and more spools of filament than you expect!!

I picked a Prusa Mini because I do not want to tinker with the machine, I want to use it. Solid choice, it just works. Alternatives are definitely cheaper, but quality is often a coin flip.

Then I started using TinkerCad as editor, dead simple and fun to use, and I made many small things that way. It was only when I felt it was limiting me, that I started moving to other tools like Fusion360 and OnShape = much more powerful but also much, much harder to learn.

Learn to design in 3d. OnShape.com is a good place to start and free. A 3d printer with nothing to print is a paperweight. Once you can design parts it is an amazing tool.

Depends on your region, but the cheapest no bullshit printer is probably any prusa. Anything cheaper and you have to be able to take apart the frame, manually square up everything, measure your diagonals, etc. If you get an ender or anything that uses the creality electronics you have to make sure that the wires in the screw terminals are not tinned (solder on the ends) and clip them and either put them in bare or crimp ferrules. It's a potential fire hazard and at least one person has reported experiencing that potential. Plus you end up tinkering, upgrading and tweaking more than printing which probably wastes any money saved by getting a cheaper printer.

Source: I have two ender 3's and they don't look like ender 3s any more.

I started with a cheap, terrible Anet A8 knockoff. It was probably $300. It took a lot of tinkering to get it to print, and a lot of tinkering to get it to finish successfully. But I learned a lot in that time, so I wouldn't call it a complete waste. But really, don't buy one of those. They're cheap for a reason.

My replacement printer is a Prusa MK3, plus an upgrade package, I think it's an MK3S now. I wasn't prepared for how easy it was to get this one to work. It's extremely rare that I get a failed print. I just fired it up again last weekend after about a year of not being used, and all I did was change the nozzle and run a bed-level check. Boom, perfect print.

Just don't spend more than 900 € in your first printer

For FDM, learning how to level your bed and set the z offset properly will save a lot of headache early on.

Decide if you want to print or tinker with your printer first. I personally don’t like the tinkering portion and learned that after it was too late. Don’t be afraid to save what you’ve got now and buy the right printer not the one that is easily picked up right now

Do you have a microcenter near you? If so, go buy a creality ender 3 pro for $150. Then watch many hours of videos of upgrading it. Spend maybe $50 on parts to make it better. Print some accessories for it. It's a lot of fun. A lot of work, but, a lot of fun. You'll spend many hours figuring it all out.

On the opposite end you can just order a pre-built printer from prusa, plug it in and start printing. Much more expensive but that thing will just work all the time.

This is assuming you're interested in an FDM printer, and might not apply as much if you're shopping for resin printers.

I like this list of 3d printers, it is maintained by users of the 3D Printing discord server, who I know have first hand experience with multiple printers. Unfortunately it's not been updated with the latest models, such as Sovol SV07 and Ender 3 v3 SE/KE.

There are sadly a lot of fake reviews and paid youtubers out there, so it's difficult to do your own research when it comes to buying tech nowadays. I fell for this and ended up with an Ender 3 v2 which I wasn't happy with before I had spent an additional €300 and many hours on modding it (though I didn't go for the cheapest mods, it could've been improved for less). Don't trust anyone who has a strong preference for a single brand. Most cheap Chinese brands have managed to design both a few good or at least decent printers, and several bad/flawed printers.

Creality is probably the most known brand when it comes to budget printers. They got a good reputation with the original Ender 3, but after establishing their position as market leaders they began using lower quality components, and appeared to have non-existing QC. IMO they also failed to keep up with the competition and ended up selling outdated and overpriced printers for several years, while paying youtubers for good reviews. Ender 3 S1 was a step in the right direction, though a bit expensive and still a gamble with QC. Ender 3 v3 looks quite promising and actually competitively priced, so hopefully they've got their shit together again but I think it's too early to tell.

Do not buy from Amazon if you have other options. Their permissive returns policy can be a double edged sword in this case. 3d printers are high precision machines, and with companies competing to make them as cheap as possible there's always a risk of a manufacturing/QC fault. It can be something really subtle, like holes drilled 1mm off or a bent aluminium extrusion, which is difficult to "debug" even for an experienced user but near impossible for a beginner. These faulty printers are often returned to Amazon where they are repackaged to look like new and sold to some other unsuspecting customer. This is less of an issue with new models, but it has happened that people have had to return multiple printers before getting a fully working unit when buying a model that has been on the market for longer.

When you get your 3d printer, find a comprehensive guide to calibrating it and go through every step. Don't touch the build plate with your hands more than necessary, fingerprints ruin adhesion.

It took me a few months to save the money for my first printer. I used that time to watch loads of videos about 3D printing. And then I bought a printer kit so I got experience with all the components. By the time I made my first print I felt pretty good about my ability to print and fix common errors. I was still an inexperienced idiot, but I was a lot better off than I might have otherwise been.

Tuvo Tornado has been practically plug and play for me. Be ready to spend a lot of time designing, printing, testing, redesigning, reprinting. Not necessarily because of the printer, but just a normal part of the process.

And don’t be afraid to print part of a design and stop the print just to verify the footprint or general dimensions are good. It takes extra time and guaranteed ‘failure’ from a fully usable part, but much better than waiting a full 5-10 hours for a full print just to realize the holes on the first layer are offset, or the walls are 5mm too close for your use case.

Accept failures, learn. Have fun!

If you want a simple no bullshit works out of the box 3D printer then Flashforge Adventurer 3 or similar. Pretty affordable, decent quality prints, minimal fussing.

I will say though that the printers get harder to use as time goes on and you have to start playing with temperatures, rafts, other annoying things as the bed warps. Great for learning though. I’ll probably upgrade to something more serviceable since my Flashforge has increased my printing appetite.

Yeah, have fun and learn from your mistakes!

Enjoy!!