I feel like we need to have a serious conversation about pizza.
You can make it a home no with no toppings for about $2.77.
You can use leftovers for toppings. But even if you pay for toppings, trying to fit more than $0.30 worth of any topping on a pizza is pretty hard.
On the left you have carpet Frozen meatballs with leftover bell peppers and some Thyme-leaved Sandwort I cleared out of a raised garden bed to make room for planting some garlic.
On the right we have your traditional bell pepper, pepperoni and Olive
All together these things are probably about $3.20 per person.
Instead of using bread dough for my pizza crust I made actual pizza crust dough. It has oregano and basil mixed in to the dough.
Yeah, steels are definitely better (got a cheap one at aldi a few months ago for $20), but I used stones for years before I got the steel and they do work. But in my experience stones are what I would consider the basic option, as you can pull it out and get a decent bottom, but steels are definitely better, even cheap ones giving a crisp bottom quickly. However, I recommended the stones mostly because there will be someone who will think a baking sheet is fine, and those generally aren’t (too low thermal mass, occasionally warp in the amount of heat that you will be cooking a pizza at, etc), whereas I’ve seen decent baking stones at the same price or lower than a baking sheet (seen at ~$5 a few times at aldi).
I guess my issue with stones is that (ideally) I’m aiming for the best pizza-baking experience, which is to me, brick-oven style, where the pizza bakes in a flash. I’ve never been able to do that with the stones I have (they don’t hold enough heat), consistently making for mediocre-good pizza, no matter how much care I take in all other steps. *shrug*