With all of the modern electronics one should be able to get good meters for very little. All of the functions are now done on a single IC. Today the price it is probably all about good packaging and branding. Fluke is the big name and makes nice products, but I suspect that today there are many other brands that do the measurements with as close an accuracy that you will never observe the difference. One simple characteristic that is commonly overlooked is how difficult it is to change the battery. Other modern features include True RMS, Capacitance, Temperature, and for some signals Counter, frequency, etc. For these things you might want to note the frequency response spec.
I have several older model multimeters and of these, I have multiple copies of some of them. I have had them for quite a while and some models are not made anymore. Consisting of: A good Fluke 115, Metex N-3800, MasTech MAS-345, Simpson style, and others. The Cheap HF give away version did not hold up long. Maybe some of their better ones would. Good leads are important as the wires commonly break at the connectors as did the cheap HF machine. I use these meters for various applications and some are permanently wired into ongoing experiments. I have other equipment and so seldom use the features like frequency response and counter. If I want to know capacitance, inductance, or impedance accurately, especially at higher frequencies, I use a better machine.
Hence, for everyday uses can employ almost any meter. This summer my Central Air went quit, I repaired it. For this I found having three meters with Temperature Thermal couples, and scales, for measuring the refrigerant line temperatures to be essential. When building electronics I found the insert-able connector for testing bipolar transistors to be very useful. While the fluke is very robust and reliable, it did not do either of these measurements directly. The old, non-electronic Simpson meter turns out to be able to measure things that electronic style meters could not. Sometimes it is best to have a simple measurement. A few years ago, the power system for my electrostatic air cleaner failed. It turned out to be a high voltage rectifier failure. Only the Simpson style meter could could measure the diode reverse current/voltage characteristics correctly to tell if a diode was good.
Price wise, you should be able to get very reliable modern meters for ~<$70. The $25 one that
them.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071JL6LLL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
I only paid $20.99 so I don't remember if it was a sale, or it was that much less than it is now.
mentioned looks pretty good and does have a temperature scale and comes with a thermocouple. Since he gave his testimonial I would not hesitate to try this for general purpose measurements.
Dave
The 114 is a fantastic multimeter for everyday troubleshooting!
