I ended up buying a used Lenovo Mini PC for $200 from a local seller, found on Facebook. It's an i7 something or other with 32GB RAM, I think I got pretty lucky with the find. Much cheaper than a Raspberry Pi considering I didn't need the pins anyway.

If you do need something like a raspberry pi I think the Arduino Uno Q is a solid choice. The 4 GB RAM variant is iirc $80 or so.

> It's an i7 something or other with 32GB RAM

Be careful, Sam Altman might be reading this!