A monitor arm’s price tag can intimidate budget shoppers. Most budget monitors sell for $200 or less. Spending another $150 to $300 for a monitor arm can seem hard to justify. Still, we encourage shoppers to avoid cheap monitor arms found on Amazon and other retailers. The least expensive monitor arms lack a dynamic tension mechanism, like a gas piston or spring. A few arms in the $35 to $50 range use a gas piston, but it’s often a wimpy example barely sufficient for holding a 27-inch monitor. Inexpensive monitor arms also lean more heavily on plastic. That’s not necessarily a problem out-of-the-box, but plastic tends to become brittle over time, which may reduce the lifespan of a monitor arm.