I am working on putting together and maintaining a list of items that are the best bang for buck so when I go to work on projects, instead of diving into amazon, newegg, or whatever, I have a nice list to pull from. I haven’t seen anyone else post that here, so I figured I’d share my work with everyone else. Please feel free to post your ideas too, and I’ll add them to the list.
Different people have different needs and aesthetics, so their lists will be very different.
There are a number of existing topics, including threads like “what should I buy next” and “ten best things to do with SmartThings” which will probably give you some more ideas. You can use the quick browse lists in the community created wiki under the project section and check out the “get started” list, I think most of them are on that one.