HEDT are a great way to go for limited API support (you can't fit all the api's, but you can serve a large amount of requests locally and route the ones you can't serve appropriately).

Notably, you can also build a consensus machine (e.g. 'witness node') for less than 1000$. My purchase price for a full api was overkill -- we can bring the costs down by optimizing for tasks rather than "do it all super fast on the same giant machine".