Great Affiliate Sites and Cost

It doesn't much matter. There are all different kinds.

Most of the income doesn't typically come from what you see on the site: it comes from the entire sales funnel and traffic-generation plans. Sometimes the "worst-looking" sites can produce very substantial incomes, and vice-versa.

It's very difficult indeed to judge anything (or learn anything much) just from seeing what the website looks like, because the overall significance to income-production of website design, in affiliate marketing, is often very small indeed.

It's a common mistake, among not-very-successful affiliate marketers (and that's perhaps 95% of them, depending on whose "figures" you believe!), to put a disproportionate amount of time/effort/energy/money into "the appearance of the website"; the reality is that this is typically a very small component in income terms.

Personally, I have content-rich sites which look at first and second glances as if the only thing really being "promoted" there is "information" (including some available in exchange for opting in). The last thing I want is for it to look like a "marketers' site". But that's just what suits my traffic demographics, as determined by my traffic-generation plan and at whom it's aimed. And almost none of the income-producing steps is very visible on my sites.

(I'll send you a p.m. with a link to an affiliate site I like, which I think is a really good one. I don't want to post it on the board without asking its owner first.)