Update I have come to a decision. Thank you to all who contributed suggestions. Please feel free to keep the discussion going to help others.
Go cheap, and go second hand if possible
I recommend using https://swappa.com to buy used phones since they have quality assurance and returns. Much safer than eBay because you could accidentally buy a phone that has its IMEI blacklisted, which shouldn’t happen with swappa.
what kind of risks are there with buying a second hand phone? I don’t know so much about how phones work. But for example with a laptop they could in theory implant all kinds of hidden spyware and backdoors in the firmware and it would be impossible to find it and remove it. The only protection against that is that we believe it’s so unlikely someone random would do that. So that is just an example what I’m talking about when I ask about what the risks would be when buying a second hand phone?
The main concern is going to be hardware reliability from wear and tear. That’s the value of buying refurbished, for which there are several reputable retailers online (some of which selling degoogled phones with their own OSes). On the software side, since I’m presuming the focus of this discussion is installing grapheneos, its not really a concern since you’re going to be reflashing the device
