Currently I buy a 100ish bucks Chinese smartphone around every 2 years and I sell locally the previous for around 2/3 of the original value, if you bought it from overseas sometimes you still recover 100% of the value after the 2 years of use.
So my advice will be buying a 150-200 bucks phone overseas and do like me sell it locally after the 2 years of use and then buy another 150-200 bucks again.
I buy 100ish cos it's enough to run my online business but if you need something better it's up to you.
The key it's into buying it directly from China just be advised of the tax local regulations, if you keep the budget you can eventually didn't pay any tax.
Good luck.
Edit: my point it's it didn't matter which phone you will buy what actually matters it's to juice it for two years and then resell it and recover a good amount of the original value, that way if you make more money with it basically you will pay nothing for the phone.
Not as illegal as pirating windows with MAS, anyway there is no point into pirating Windows anymore only if you want to change your wallpaper and taskbar colors.
Can you use a VPN at the same time as DNS66?