We worked around the minis thing in 4E by me buying a 1" hole punch (admittedly I did have to go to a very silly shop to find this, but it was kinda near Orc's Nest) and a few sheets of coloured cardboard, total price under £10, and a got a fairly large remaindered misaligned Chessex wipe-clean grid map thing (which was like, £30 or something), and yes I was being cheap on purpose because I was offended by the notion of minis. Then I just glued 1p coins to the back of the 1" circles and wrote monster indicators on the circles (like K1 for Kobold 1 but of course it could also be Kenku 1 or whatever).