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I have a Galaxy S5, a flagship phone that I bought new a year and a half after they quit making them. I paid $200. I think the original price was close to $700. It does have a user replaceable battery so I bought a spare battery and a charger for that battery. It's worked out very nicely. It's not a current flagship phone but it's still faster than greased lightning. It was close but it won. I burned my fingers greasing the lightning.
My previous phone was a Nexus 5, which was a flagship phone about the same time but I got it new after it's replacement models were already selling well for, I think, $150. It was an amazing phone, far nicer than the Samsung, but it didn't get very good battery life and it wasn't possible to simply swap in another battery when it got low.
By the way, both of them upgraded to Android 6 the day I got them. Not the latest OS but pretty close.
Anyway, if you want a flagship phone and you don't want to pay much for it there are ways. The key is to shop and don't be in a hurry. Learn what the various features are and decide which you care about and then look for those. And teach yourself enough to watch for the pitfalls, like the short battery life of the Nexus. It was my first smartphone and I didn't know to look for that. I know now.
That said, I had smartphones before these, not that I used as phones but that I used for media and with Wifi. Those were cheap and also selected carefully and patiently and my guess is that I'd have been just as happy with them as phones. I still use my Moto E2 for reading. It gets better battery life than either of my flagship phones and, while it's CPU is much slower I really can't tell the difference when I'm doing most things.
Barry
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