At least get a WRT841N, they are like 15$+sales tax, unless you get the wrong vendor. Less if you find refurb's or buy bulk. They are the main workhorse for our

At least get a WRT841N, they are like 15$+sales tax, unless you get the wrong vendor. Less if you find refurb's or buy bulk. They are the main workhorse for our local mesh network, with WRT1043 devices handling encrypted uplinks due to the lack of speed with chacha/poly running on the former (think under 10Mbit/s). Don't worry, they do handle advanced mesh routing algorithms at line rate, e.g. 2x2 mimo 802.11n and 100BASE-T (4+1 ports). E.g., they handle mesh domains of about a thousand nodes before one needs to split, and mostly due to L2 traffic starting to hog the slower links (it's an L2 mesh).