I also replaced a rock, a brick, and a rubber wedge with magnetic door holders, each about $5. Now when we're bringing in the groceries, we can keep the door open without the rock, and it's easy to close when we're done.
I just invested in 4 MoCA adapters and a Ubiquiti UDM/2 small APs (tall & skinny row home with 3 floors but now I get 500 Mbps everywhere in the house including the roof) but it ran way over $200.
FWIW, I got only the 1Gbps speed, rather than 2.5Gbps, because my fiber internet tops out at around 900Mbps and I'm the only one in my family who does anything substantial the local network. For once in my life, I might have enough bandwidth at home.
Another problem with mesh networks in general is that they're very sensitive to placement, because they need to be able to see each other (in an RF sense, not visually) to form the backhaul. It adds an additional constraint on your physical topology beyond the regular one of wanting to use the laptop on the couch and in the kitchen. So you end up moving the mesh nodes to corners of the room where you didn't really want them to be, aesthetically. At a certain point you ask yourself whether it would have been easier to run the damn cable through the ceiling than to play musical chairs every few weeks.
I ended up going for in-ceiling AP's, having the house wired for Ethernet, and powering them with PoE. Now the network is faultless.
Speeds are much faster and (more importantly) far more stable.
