A phone will get you a usable photo of a bright room. Where it falls down is the room with a window in the frame, which in real estate is most rooms. Phone HDR handles that by crushing the window into gray mush or turning the walls blue from the sky bounce. That's the shot brokerages judge you on.
A workable entry kit, buying used, tends to look like this. A crop sensor body with a wide zoom, roughly $700 to $1,200 together. One speedlight and a trigger, another $150 to $250, because a single flash bounced at the ceiling is what fixes the window problem. A sturdy tripod with a level, $150 or so. So you're between $1,000 and $1,700 in hardware, not $4,000.
Software is cheap by comparison. The usual photo editing subscription runs about $12 to $15 a month for one person. If you'd rather send files out than sit there masking windows, retouchers who specialize in real estate charge roughly $1 to $3 an image with overnight turnaround. Prices move, so check current rates before you build them into a quote. A 3D capture camera is the big jump, low thousands to buy, and the tour hosting is a separate monthly plan, often $10 at the entry level up to $70 or more for multiple active tours.
That hosting line is the one people forget. Tours live on the vendor's servers, so if you stop paying the plan, old tour links can go dark, including on listings you delivered a year ago. Decide early whether you're hosting forever or handing the client their own account.
