[droningparrot]

I've had good experiences running OpenWRT on the TP-Link Archer C7. It's a popular router and I've been able to find plenty of them used for around $40

[clircle]

I've got a C7 and it doesn't even need a cloud account to set up

[cpach]

The default firmware on C7 is quite nice and is good enough for most users. I guess OpenWRT gives more options for power-users though.