I recently bought another Kurt Kinetic Road Machine On Ebay for $270 with shipping (for my wife). If I couldn't afford a KK Road machine, I would not waste money on a cheaper trainer. I learned that lesson the hard way when I bought a cheaper mag trainer once and sold it a week later. My KK Road Machine is now 7 years old and still works like new - probably with at least 5000 trainer miles on it. These things rock.

Another great reason to not go cheap:

Even if you HATE the KK or Cycleops Fluid2 for whatever reason, you can always resell it locally for a very good price, even if it's well used. You'll probably recapture at least 65% of the original value, more if it's less than 2 years old or in very good condition. You rarely see these things going for <$150 since they get snapped up quick.

Starting my third winter on a $150 Graber. It's been pretty mild out, so I've only needed it twice so far.

It's a plain old mag trainer. It does the trick for me. I'm not looking for miracles--just to maintain fitness at maybe 90%. I also have lesser expectations than a lot of people.

I just bought a new Kinetic fluid 2 trainer for $270 shipped on ebay and the Cyclops ones are about the same price on amazon . I figured if I hate using the trainer I can sell it on Craigslist for $200 pretty quickly, and if I buy the crappy $120 trainers it's probably nearly worthless if I don't like it and it's going to end up taking up space or being thrown out if I don't use it. That's my justification for buying the good one anyway.

After checking out different trainers on the advice of people on this forum, I went for the basic Performance Travel Trac fluid trainer; $169 plus tax, and since I live reasonably close to a Performance shop, I picked it up. I ride it every other day.

My wrist is recuperating from an operation five weeks ago, and I've got a least a month to go before I can put both hands on the bars without a cast, so I'm enjoying my time on the trainer; living in Southern California, I rid it outside.

I don't worry about progressive resistance. I simply warm up in a low gear, shift the gears up when I want to work hard, and the faster I pedal, the higher my heart rate climbs.

At the end of an hour - during which I listen to music on my iPad and sometimes read a book - I get a great workout. I also aim a good fan at my torso and head.

As DCRainmaker noted about even the more basic, mag version of the Travel Trac, for "the vast majority of basic use cases, it works quite well."

So, OP, if you're looking for a fluid trainer and you want to spend less than $200, check into the Travel Trac.

I got a used one from my neighbor for $20. Works just fine.