As far as I can remember, every daily-carry knife I've ever had was inexpensive. Were I to go out to the garage and look, I'd find a mixture of Kershaw, Gerber, SAK, MIL-K, Leatherman, and others. I paid no more than $100 or so for any of them; most were considerably less than that. (This does NOT always apply to knives I depended on in the outdoors, e.g. my Gerber BMF and original LMF.)
For the past several years my EDC has been an orange Leatherman Juice S2. It has performed every task I asked of it, and it fits neatly into the watch pocket of my jeans. They're out of production now, so any decent examples are likely to be quite pricey. IIRC I bought it at an REI store for less than $100.
As I posted earlier, an old proverb reminds us that "Better is the enemy of Good Enough."