I've paid 200€ for my PinePhone. It is underpowered, but at least it doesn't have to waste its resources on rendering ads.
Where Android/iPhone users have "apps", I mostly end up writing small shell scripts around existing linux tools. My alarm clock "app" is realized via cron jobs; my TOTP "app" is a one-liner around `oathtool`.
Messenger apps are a bit tricky; I'll probably end up hosting my own matrix homeserver and then have bridges running for Signal and the likes.