The Spartan-3E starter with a 500K-gate FPGA costs about $100, IIRC.

There are others, of course.

Read the fine print, though. Many of these "evaluation" kits allow you to "evaluate" certain IP modules and the general behavior of their FPGA within the context that they intended, i.e, conditions that favor their devices, but have so much "stuff" on them that you can't really "try out" their product in a real situation because those "features" that they've included get in the way.

I normally use off-the-shelf boards in my work. I've found that boards that contain the FPGA, an oscillator, and a configuration ROM, with little else, work out the best for me.

What's important is that the included FPGA's seldom have enough "real estate" to enable you to implement all the extra hardware that has been put on the board, and for which you've paid, e.g, SDRAM, FLASH ROM, ETHERNET PHY, RS232 buffers, etc, and, just as often, the presence of these devices interferes with the availability of the FPGA pins that are used for them. Some boards work just fine for me, others don't.

RE