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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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A second hand NUC is quite a bit cheaper than a pi once you factor in power supply, storage and case. They're also not as power hungry as you suggest. My entire smarthome is powered by an old NUC running Proxmox with HA in a VM and some LXCs (adguard among other things), and it pulls a meager 7W on average, that's only a few more than a pi and it has a 3ghz quadcore CPU, 16gb ram and 1tb NVME, so it has all the overhead you need to do small projects on the side with it as well.
Unless you need the GPIO, an SBC is pretty much never the best solution anymore.
If you plan on doing a lot with the machine then yeah it does make sense to get something better than a Pi. But for just octoprint any Pi is plenty.
SD cards are a couple dollars, the pi 3 and below will run on any usb power brick. The 4 and 5 will run on any not low power brick you have lying around, but even if you feel the need to buy one the official one is like $15, and you can reuse it for other things too. And you can always 3d print a case if that's really a problem, but I just let my pis dangle there, or I put them back in their box.
Also second hand pis exist too, if you're really strapped for cash you can get a full pi, case, sd card, and power supply for about the price of just the pi new. During the pandemic when Pis weren't in stock I got a full setup for a pi 3 + this bluetooth keyboard trackpad thingy for $30.
But for 15$ more, you get an immensely more useful tool for when you (probably) inevitably want to do more/other things. SD cards for a few bucks burn out really quickly, so you'd really want a good one (significantly more expensive) or an SSD, bringing the total cost of a pi above a used NUC, with worse specs all around.
I really can't see the argument, neither financial, performance/watt or performance/$ for an SBC if you don't need GPIOs.
That's the key here, not everyone wants to do that. OP specifically asked for something to run octoprint, not an entire homelab. Not everyone is interested in that.