"PixHawk flight controller"
That's a nice controller, but heavy and expensive, 37 grams and $75 according to amazon. My sub-250g build used a Naze32 which weighs about 4 grams without connectors and was $35. I flashed it with cleanflight from github
https://github.com/cleanflight/cleanflight
Presumably OP wanting to modify stuff will want FOSS like cleanflight.
This is of course ancient obsolete history because things move fast in multicopter world and that was like 6 months ago. Not even sarcasm. This advice was reasonably contemporary last fall, but this spring I donno.
OP will rapidly get into a scalability problem where I assume OP wants to do something interesting or complicated and aerospace is highly optimized so OP is likely to have much more success driving a flight controller as if it servos using a ras-pi or something, than trying to compile cleanflight to add Alexa to the cleanflight itself or whatever it is OP is trying to do.
Electronics have improved quite a bit. Back in the 80s we'd buy a $200 mosfet motor controller with a half pound heatsink and connect it to a $20 motor in your RC dune buggy (running off old fashioned nicads LOL) but now a days you attach a $11 no-heatsink controller to a $40 brushless motor and call it good. Of course you don't need a cooling fan if you have hundreds of watts of fan blowing on it from half an inch away...
Something to think about ops desire for a $100 multicopter is control electronics and surprisingly chassis and props and serial receivers are cheap, but I dropped $40 on EACH motor, by far the most expensive part of the build. Of course at 220 grams flying weight my build has the vertical acceleration performance of a large model rocket, which can be slightly terrifying when learning to fly, something lower performance but still flyable might be cheaper. I just thought it interesting that most of my build's money is in the motors, like about half of it.