i went through 1000s addons on blender market, gumroad and other sites looking for cheap but useful addons under 2$ so that you don’t have to.

you don’t always have to spend a lot of money to get quality products, for example blender is free and a lot of artists find it more powerful than expensive software like maya and 3d max.

but blender like many other applications can’t do everything, thats why you need addons lots and lots of addons. thankfully blender addons are not as expensive as other software addons, for example insydium fused which is a collection of cinema4d plugins comes in at 900$, with that kind of money you would buy 50 blender addons and still have spare change to throw around, most blender addons are around 10$ which is cheap but most of the time you need more than a few addons which can add up the cost easily. so if you are on a thin budget bookmark this list for the most useful addons under 2$.

1 BlendRef

ever hard of puref, its an amazing software for collecting and viewing reference images, its a standalone application that costs around $7 minimum, while that does not sound very expensive for someone trying to get more than one addon on a budget, you should know there is an alternative called blendref, which is a blender addon that you can download for free on github, it works like pure ref and some of the shortcuts are the same, the major difference is that you never have to leave blender as you are working.

2 Plant Models Vol 60 Blender

when you think of plants and vegetations, most of you think of plant libraries like botaniq or nisarga, these libraries come with all the trees, plants, grass and vegetation that you will ever need for any sort of projects unfortunately they are not for someone on a really tight budget, with Nisarga lite costing $44 and Nisarga ultimate costing about $119 and botaniq coming in at $49.99 lite and full version at $129.99, so if you want the same quality but a smaller selection of plants then this volume of plant models comes with over 60 models at just $1. main difference is that you dont get the functionality like scattering and instancing features that come with nisarga or botaniq.

3 Chalk Style Wireframe Blender Addon

for those in the profession of selling 3d models you know presenting your model is key to making an impression, but blender does not render wireframes in cycles or eevee, unless you screenshot the viewport, and loose out on the quality of the rendered image, if you have a dollar to spare, this chalk style wireframe addon can be a quick solution for you.

4 Procedural Rain

i have done a tutorial on making procedural rain the tutorial is free to watch here but the project file is $3 dollars just to help me keep the lights on and cover internet cost, but that is just a project file its not an addon and still has some kinks to iron out as it was just for education purposes and not meant as a full product, if you want a complete product your options are simple rain at $14.99, , baga rain generator at 12$, procedural rain at $5 and finally for those on a tight budget Dynamic Rain at $2

5 Gravity Collider Physics Plugin

the problem with living in a capitalist world is that we have been led to believe that the only way to get quality products is by paying more, though this might be true sometimes its not always true especially when it comes to addons, for example this gravity collider addon is just $1 and it adds secondary animation based on physics to hair, clothes and alot more. adding this sort of animation to your characters with out an addon like this would take you hrs, this addon does in in seconds.

6 save selection

for just 2$ you can save your selections using this addon, i bet you have never thought of a use case for something like this but now that you know its a thing, you are going to think of multiple use cases every time you work, like when you learn a new word and you start seeing it everywhere as if it was hiding from you before you knew about it.

7 Screen Space Global Illumination

global illumination is when light bounces around walls and objects and is reflected on objects or areas that are not in direct light, this is how the world works and its how cycles and most render engines work but for some reason global illumination is not supported in eevee, it costs you approximately 0$ to have this function in eevee with this free addon.

8 Checker V1

this is a 1$ addon to check your uvs using a checker image, blender already comes with an image to check your uvs but to use it, your objects need to have materials and you have to do a lot of steps to have the checkmark image appear on the model, this addon does away with all the unnecessary steps so you can check your uvs in just one single button click. the maker of this addon is also the creator of zen uv one of the most popular uv unwrapping addon on the market so they know what they are doing.

9 Blenrig 6

the most popular rigging addon on the market auto rig pro is over $19 for the lite version and the full version at $40 if you are looking for a cheap alternative blenrig is just 1$.

10 Simple Tabs

with all these inexpensive addons you have collected, you are going to need a way to organize them, use this free simple tabs to continue your journey of collecting useful blender addons on a budget. good luck.