If you have sites that cheap you're probably not using all the power of Drupal and have a different scale of problem. If you use Drupal for simpler sites then you have simpler problems than us, but not simpler than something other than Drupal. There are still significantly more sites still on D8 than on D9, despite the huge security concerns and that tells you a lot about how much complexity is involved for many of us. You can also go on Slack and see many Drupal channels full of folks hitting problems, a lot of them with Composer and a lot of others on the Drupal end. Hell there's a Slack channel just for discussing problems.
Our budget closer to double your max. We built on the bleeding edge and we end up with some shaky foundations, like modules that were core to us but then were never updated... but were too expensive to replace. Others I know who built in the first couple of years of stable D8 have had similar issues. Plus Composer was not the norm yet when we built the site so we retrofitted Composer a few years later, meaning Composer was fragile too and also fragile because of the dependencies of bleeding edge modules that have no upgrade path and use things no longer supported by Composer 2 and/or D9. We had to switch scaffolding as well and have hosting challenges to boot related to different requirements for D8 and D9 and CI processes.
More complex sites have far more complex challenges. Our next site will be more in the price range you mention because we will almost certainly have to pick something other than Drupal.
If you have sites that cheap you're probably not using all the power of Drupal and have a different scale of problem. If you use Drupal for simpler sites then you have simpler problems than us, but not simpler than something other than Drupal. There are still significantly more sites still on D8 than on D9, despite the huge security concerns and that tells you a lot about how much complexity is involved for many of us. You can also go on Slack and see many Drupal channels full of folks hitting problems, a lot of them with Composer and a lot of others on the Drupal end. Hell there's a Slack channel just for discussing problems.
Our budget closer to double your max. We built on the bleeding edge and we end up with some shaky foundations, like modules that were core to us but then were never updated... but were too expensive to replace. Others I know who built in the first couple of years of stable D8 have had similar issues. Plus Composer was not the norm yet when we built the site so we retrofitted Composer a few years later, meaning Composer was fragile too and also fragile because of the dependencies of bleeding edge modules that have no upgrade path and use things no longer supported by Composer 2 and/or D9. We had to switch scaffolding as well and have hosting challenges to boot related to different requirements for D8 and D9 and CI processes.
More complex sites have far more complex challenges. Our next site will be more in the price range you mention because we will almost certainly have to pick something other than Drupal.