Recently began playing Dungeons and Dragons 5e with some local friends who have never played any kind of TTRPG game before. As the Dungeon Master, I'm working with a pretty barebones set of "gear" to get the game rolling:

• PDFs and https://5e.tools/ -- DND is not an especially rules-heavy game; buying a large number of expensive rulebooks does not feel especially necessary. Having PDFs and that site at hand can make quick rules lookup easy, and, more importantly, costs $0
• Laminated 1" square A4 paper -- I got a few of these made for about $2. It's easy to draw maps over them with a dry erase marker and wipe them up when done. A $30-$50 Chessex battlemap would be nice at some point, maybe, but this is cheap, extremely portable, more than enough, and easily replaced. I don't tape them together, so it's easy to trasnport them.
• Character tokens -- bottle caps, toys, lighters, erasers, coins, chess pieces... any little thing can work to represent characters. I encourage players to bring their own. For monsters, I have a ziplock bag with various kinds of colored aquarium rocks. Cheap and plentiful!
• Homebrew DM screen -- also laminated, and taped together. A bonus of a DM screen is that character sheets and other papers, such as the grid paper, can be tucked inside for easy transport. I didn't laminate it for writing purposes but rather to keep the pages in good shape.
• Tablet -- as the DM I use this for reading through adventures. Easy to transport and easily hides behind the screen.
• Notebook -- I keep monster tables, track initiative, track XP and keep other little notes here. I've tried loose-tracking game notes before and they have a habit of getting lost. In battles, I keep the initiative table on the left side where I also track monster HP and use the right side for monster stat blocks, maps, and misc notes. Works very well.
• Dice sets -- one per player. Ideally every player would bring their own dice but they don't break the bank and it's satisfying to keep a big bag o' dice. Players get to choose their set on a first come, first serve basis. (No need for dice towers because those are no fun.)

Excluding the tablet, which I already owned, all in all it was about $20 for everything. The dice were the most expensive bit. Now that I have a base operating set, any part (except the tablet lol) can be easily replaced if lost or damaged. If the game price were divided up among the players, they would have only had to chip in a few bucks to start playing.

It would be nice to play on 3D maps with little painted metal figures on a big gaming table. But this is already enough to get everyone comfortably playing! You can get into tabletop RPGs without breaking the bank.

I would like to try moving on to DND 1e or some OSR game later (OSRIC? OSE Advanced?) once the players get the hang of 5e. Mechanically, 5e characters feel a bit "samey" ... not as bad as 4e was though. I appreciate that 5e is a bit lighter on rules than 3.5e but a bit more "crunchiness" would still improve the game. My biggest criticism of DND 5e is that it takes a long time for people to set up their characters, but I hope it can motivate them to strive to keep their players alive.