On Aliexpress $30 will get you a 3GB/64GB box somewhere along the lines of Mali750, which is quite impressive.
But like others have said, you are likely to bump into issues.
In my experience: I still own a Mali 450 device 2GB/16GB and run LibreELEC on it. I can't update because it needs 1-2 proprietary drivers that only run with the 3.14 kernel. The vendors made efforts to open source the graphics drivers and the hardware of my box is really really supported well, which it might not be on other boxes. Still on Armbian I would only get some guesstimated 1/3rd of the graphics performance I get with LibreELEC (uses framebuffer directly) or Android. From Firefox I could play 720p videos from the Youtube desktop website, while on Armbian Youtube only plays 480p acceptably and 1080p barely with a few framedrops directly without browser.
So on the one hand you are likely to run into similar issues (or worse). On the other, $30 will get you so much horsepowers nowadays that it doesn't matter as severely as other people like me have experienced it before you.
I believe though, your question is very important and maybe even the most important of all questions in this forum: Which box costs $30 and is well supported?
And the answer of course isn't to just buy a more expensive box.
We as a community and from a developer POV should be able to come up with a good answer. Maybe we can focus our efforts on just one type of box for every X gigabytes of RAM in the generations.
$30 TV boxes running Armbian are a cornerstone to the Fediverse, P2P networks, privacy, self-hosting, press and information freedom. A $120 Rasperry Pi isn't.
I came here to find an answer to the question as well and I hope there is one or that we can find one together.
