I just bought a Netgear R7800 from the local craigslist for 75 euro. I can recommend to search for second hand devices, saves a lot of money
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I have a ZBT-WE1326 - Easily obtainable from AliExpress for example - https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ZBT_WE1326
It has a USB port, mini-pcie, sdcard slot and sim slot. It has a nice web based recovery system if you brick it somehow.
I needed 4G connectivity and gigabit switch/ports so this was the best solution. I just couldn't get the 4G led to blink on this. That is the only bug I can tell about. Perhaps another is that I could not get hardware encryption working but that may be my fault 
What you will do with your router exactly?
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fwiw, Amazon UK and eBuyer.com have the linksys ea6350 (v3 = ipq4018) AC1200 router for £34 (37€) at the moment.
(eBuyer charge £4 for UK delivery)
update: only ea6350 v3 is ipq4018 as pointed out by @shifty. v3 has been available since Aug 2016 according to wikidevi - it seems unlikely Amazon UK would still be selling v1 or v2, but I suppose there is a chance ebuyer may be disposing of old inventory, but fwiw ebuyer did have similar offer almost 11 months ago. Amazon UK are out of stock but are accepting back orders.
update 29 July 2019: My ea6350 I ordered from Amazon UK for £34 finally turned up after 3 weeks. There is nothing on external LInksys packaging to indicate it is a 'v3'. Only the underside of the actual router is labelled 'ea6350v3'.
A quick google seems to suggest the earlier EA6350 v2 is supplied in a similar style box, but it has a darker blue colour scheme. The image of a smart app in top right corner is also slightly different. Here is a screen grab from December 2017 youtube video
Below is another EA6350 v2 in revised packaging which looks 'almost' the same as EA6360 v3 packaging, apart from the smart app image in top right corner of the box. Note the 3 icons for v2 smartapp image vs 2 icons for the v3.
Here is the new EA6350-4B based on Mediatek MT7621 SoC which went on sale in 2020 in the USA.
[https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_EA6350_v4]
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@bill888 That looks like a good device even without discount. Perhaps I should have gotten that but I like to have my LTE modem inside the device.
While 256 MB is still very reasonable RAM, prospective purchasers should be aware of
I'm a software engineer of ZBT company.Our products WE1326 and WE3526 memory has been changed from 512MB to 256MB.Pls check commit cf8406a and 7841905,and modify the corresponding dts file.The follwing is the code that be modified and tested.
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Just want to add a note for EA6350, make sure you get v3 hardware.
v1 and v2 still use single core Broadcom. And currently, OpenWRT development for EA6350 v3 is still in snapshot, not stable yet.
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I don't understand why they reduce the memory. I bet it costs 20cents more to have it 512MB instead of 256MB. It should be illegal to make smaller memory module then 1GB. 
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fwiw, Amazon UK appear to have stock of EA6350 (presumed to be v3 model if identical to the one I received last week) at £33.48 for immediate delivery, price matching ebuyer.com. Amazon UK can deliver to Europe for nominal charge btw.
Note these will come with a UK 3 pin power adapter (see photo). They are rated at 12 volts DC, 2 Amps. 5mm barrel plug with 2.1mm internal diameter with positive polarity on centre pin. (I believe CCTV camera power adapters use same 2.1mm hole size barrel plug. The other more common barrel plug size has a larger 2.5mm hole)
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A "Class VI" adapter is reasonably efficient. With the cost of electricity here (US$0.30 per kWh), I trade out any of the older Class V or poorer supplies.
See, for example https://www.cui.com/efficiency-standards
Note that the class doesn't have anything to do with output accuracy, stability, ripple, transients, ... , but generally the boards have a secondary regulator that drops 12 V to 3.3 V (and lower, as needed by the chips).
As hinted, using "another" supply with a 2.5 mm socket on a 2.1 mm pin often results in unexplained reboots of routers.
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Curious what made them decide to change to Mediatek, I thought Qualcomm is better in general?
I mean on mobile phones, Mediatek is usually associated with low-end devices (CMIIW)
Realtek SoCs are completely unsupported by OpenWrt. Realtek doesn't contribute anything whatsoever to the OpenWrt codebase, they just use an old OpenWrt based SDK.
Avoid like the plague.
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Why is no one recommending the absolute beauty that is the Ubiquiti Edgerouter X is beyond me. Hardware offload, small, lots of space. Yes, it doesn't have wifi, but I'd treat that as a good thing.
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Because hardware offload seems to cause instability in come cases, no wifi, debricking isn't user-friendly and it's MIPS instead of ARM to mention a few things...
Because hardware offload seems to cause instability in come cases
Sure, but it's not like competing arm socs are stable to begin with.
no wifi
Seeing the state of opensource wifi I'd wager that's a good thing. ath10k is crap, mwl is less than stellar as well, and the mediatek chips are only now starting to appear, with the driver not in mainline as well.
debricking isn't user-friendly
If you update to any 2.0 edgeos before flashing openwrt you get a new bootloader which supports tftp recovery
and it's MIPS instead of ARM
If you want to treat your router as a thing which runs apps then maybe, otherwise a good thing. Even on software offload it does linespeed routing with cycles to spare, my old ipq8064 couldn't do that.
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IPQ4*** or Marvell are just as stable or even better in my experience (yes, I have all) at least running master branch.
No one forces you to even include drivers if you don't want to but I have ath10k-ct and mwlwifi (5Ghz) running just fine including WDS. That said, 2.4GHz can be mixed bag at least on WRT3200ACM in my experience.
Regarding debricking you still need a serial cable to engage TFTP recovery as far as I can tell? It might not be a huge deal but it's still one more step to do...
You don't necessarily need lump all ARM SoCs all together, IPQ (QCA) doesn't have as good support upstream as lets say Marvell (ARMv7 and better) but IPQ401X is pretty decent for what it is and I'd say that it has "better" support than IPQ806* at least for now however newer kernels have better support (better performance).
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I'll grant you that I got disillusioned by ARM after getting a C2600, and don't have any ipq401* device. They were supposed to deliver gigabit routing, and it turned out really fast that not only they can't do that without special accelerator cores, they're actually slower than the qca mips cores they were replacing.
I already voiced my opinions about ath10k-ct some time ago : it's noble, but it's only one person who's trying to fixup what mess qualcomm did with ath10k. Look at the github bugtracker. I'm glad it works for you, but it's not something I'd feel comfortable deploying in a production setting, especially since a couple of those are mine, and the response is "tough shit, I don't have a qca9980, it's abandoned by qca anyway". Which again, I hold no grudge over, but it's a far cry from the support that ath9k got by virtue of being completely opensource
And no, with the new ER-X bootloader, you just hold the button for 30s and it runs a tftp server. No serial dongle required anymore https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019289113
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What's the most compatible chipset/wifi you can get with OpenWRT? Or the best generally for decent driver support?
Make that: The best for ~50€
Has anyone spotted any ipq40xx bargains?
The ea6350v3 and NBG6617 are currently substantially more expensive than a year ago.
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The ASUS RT-ACRH13 is only 45$ right now on amazon: