[doubled112]

How much does a Raspberry Pi 4/5 use with some sort of external storage running? How much does one cost once you factor in a case, cooling, storage, and a power supply?

I paid $195 NEW for a Beelink S12 Mini with 16GB RAM, 500GB NVMe, and an Intel N95 CPU

I believe it is said to idle at about 8W. It's a powerful enough machine you could run a bunch of small VMs on it, assuming your workload didn't involve GPIO or other hardware things.

I rolled a handful of RPis into VMs on one Orange Pi 5 because it has memory to do so and I wasn't using anything Pi specific.