can you guys recommend a piece of machinery, in $200-400 range that you know works fairly good, won't break easily and won't be too much of a deficit. So if i make $2/day let's say electricity cost $3/day, something like that is fine where i'm losing each day.
Can you give us your electricity cost in cents per kWh (including any taxes). Also if you have somewhere to run the miner where the noise and large amount of heat will not be an issue.
It makes a major difference to the preferred hardware and your costs.
For example to earn $2 per day you would need about 1.5 Terrahash (
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty).
This is about 1 S4 or 4 S3s (or 1.5 S5s). You are looking at about 1,400 Watts, which is quite a bit of heat.
The electricity will cost roughly $4.00 per day assuming you are paying around 15 cents per kWh.