Depends. For extract brewing you can easily do it for $100-150 if you bottle the beer(with your biggest expense being a large 5+ gallon kettle), adding another $100-150 if you keg.
Full grain brewing is significantly more expensive (unless you do the "Brew in a Bag" style) simple setups easily put you into the $400+ range. Purpose-built full grain brewing systems setup with pumps, three burners and kettles will set you back $2500-5000 depending upon how nice of a setup you get and the volume (15 gallons to 40 gallons), and that doesn't even include the fermentation equipment which for heated and cooled conicals can be $2000+.
Homebrewing has a very active higher end market which is only getting more active as it becomes easier for individuals to move from hobbyist to professional pico/nano/micro-brewer.
All grain isn't that much more expensive. All you need to step up to a full all grain setup is an igloo cooler and a false bottom - ~$100 USD worth of gear.
If you're batch sparging you can use your boil kettle to heat strike, then sparge water. You just need an extra vessel for the first runnings.
Sure, if you really skimp you can do stuff fairly cheap, but if you don't want to go insane with all the juggling you're generally looking at two kettles, and an igloo. They do sell some setups with two igloo's, but then when you're sparging you are either doing batch sparging (which can be a bit tricky to keep the temps right) or you're doing a mash out with water from a separate smaller kettle.
Brewing can certainly be done on the cheap if money is more constrained than time and effort. And there are definitely no shortage of creative ways people have devised to save some money.
Full grain brewing is significantly more expensive (unless you do the "Brew in a Bag" style) simple setups easily put you into the $400+ range. Purpose-built full grain brewing systems setup with pumps, three burners and kettles will set you back $2500-5000 depending upon how nice of a setup you get and the volume (15 gallons to 40 gallons), and that doesn't even include the fermentation equipment which for heated and cooled conicals can be $2000+.
Homebrewing has a very active higher end market which is only getting more active as it becomes easier for individuals to move from hobbyist to professional pico/nano/micro-brewer.