>It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300.

Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years

Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything.

This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear. A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start.

Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)