Coffee can be a dangerous rabbit hole to tumble down. I have several other friends who love their coffee but think I'm nuts.
In terms of a low cost entry for a better everyday cup, I'd recommend pour over. The Hario V60 is a classic, well respected pour over dipper. You can pick them up in plastic, glass, and ceramic all for short money. I own a dripper called the Stagg, from a company called Fellow I just happen to like. Chemex is another popular one, though I'd go Hario over Chrmex myself.
The grinder is more important, and what you asked about to begin with. There are a lot of good brands and types of burr grinder out there. Manual grinders will give you a little more bang for your buck, but of course that's because it's manual and you're doing all the work.
Ultimately it depends on what your budget is and what you like. The grinder I currently use for everything except espresso is the Fellow Ode Gen 2. Fellow also just came out with a lower priced grinder that's supposed to cover all the bases called the Opus.
Some other popular grinder brands are Baratza and Eureka. My espresso grinder is a Eureka for example. You can fall deeper down the rabbit hole and find grinders that cost thousands, but that's not necessary. I would recommend finding something better than a blade grinder though.
After that you'll need a simple gooseneck kettle. Again, you can go nuts here, like I eventually did. My electric gooseneck can be programed to the degree, can hold temp for 30 minutes if I want it to, set a schedule so it goes on and off on its own... in other words, a bunch of stuff no normal person needs when a $15 kettle will boil water just as well.
A simple scale will help too. You can always eyeball it, but good coffee is about ratios. 15:1 water to coffee is a solid starting point and the best way to know you're hitting that is to measure your coffee and your water. You can get cheap coffee scales on Amazon that are fine, but like everything else in this hobby there's an absurdly priced option out there somewhere. This is one piece of the puzzle I haven't taken the plunge on. Somehow the scale is my line in the sand, of all things.
It's like any hobby of course, the deeper you go, the more ridiculous it gets. What should be something simple gets more complicated and more expensive. If you start getting into espresso things start getting even more expensive because good espresso machines are not cheap. Flair does some really nice manual machines, which can be more affordable.
Anyway, I've have rambled something fierce. Less than about $30 on a dripper, a kettle, and maybe a couple of hundred on a good grinder will open up a lot. But be sure you want to make the jump. There's $2000 of coffee nonsense on my coffee cart because I had to keep getting more. Jesus, I
needed a coffee cart because I have so much crap my wife wanted the counter space back.
