I notice people complaining about the extortionate prices of single board computers - especially the more recent raspberry pi models. It's true, prices for many things have become absurdly high, and are likely to get higher as long as the Iran war is going on and blocking 20% of the world's oil supply.

It might also be that the era of affordable computing is over, and that the most that the average hobbyist can expect is to have a cheap Android phone acting as a "thin client" to heavyweight centralized subscription software services. Kinda like the mainframe paradigm of the 1960s. The days when non-specialists could afford a laptop or a desktop machine might be coming to an end.

Even if this doomy outlook is true, there will still be a lot of legacy hardware around. I still have a few older single board computers, and you don't even need a lot of RAM to run a server with XMPP and IRC on it. With some shenanigans, those old SBCs can boot from an SSD, which makes them more practical than running from a slow and lossy microSD.

So use whatever hardware you already have. Go against the trend and build software that's more compute efficient than the previous versions, not less. The people who are really going to lose out in the current situation are those trying to run very bloated software (such as nodejs stuff), with excessive container/VM orchestration, on increasingly pricey minimum hardware specs.

Also with the rising cost of storage, be more skeptical of simplistic "number go up" evaluations of technology. Do you really need to be storing high resolution videos or using cameras that produce 30 megapixel or higher sized images, eating up storage space? My guess is that in the majority of cases the answer is "no".

I have a few spare laptops which were donated to me because they were "out of date" (doing air quotes) but will run Debian just fine. That's thanks to Microsoft and the hardware requirements of recent versions of Windows.