In the UK A mid to high end linksys or an ASUS-RT router would cost you north of 180 GBP, anything below 150 GBP or so is often not better than what you get from the ISP here, both BT has a decent box for the braindead and some small ISPs like Zen offer mid range FritzBoxes (3XXX series).
Before that I've basically was running DD-WRT but I just gave up on it, too many problems, advanced features are not supported, issues with routers, security issues taking a long ass time to fix and unless I'm willing to script everything It became unmanageable via the web interface.
I also consider the ubiquiti purchase as one if not the best tech purchase of 2017, I didn't realize the prices came down so much when I was looking at it as an option a few years ago it was 3 or more times the price.