>needing to buy hardware for a service that will likely be languishing in a year and sunsetted in two
Just use your old rig. I used the same CPU for 7 years and it was never the bottleneck. The only reason I upgraded was because a bad PSU killed my GPU after 5 years. You order the GPU from your local online shop (Amazon is overpriced), remove 3 screws to open the case and plop in the new card. This doesn't take more than 15 minutes and you're good to go.
Just use your old rig. I used the same CPU for 7 years and it was never the bottleneck. The only reason I upgraded was because a bad PSU killed my GPU after 5 years. You order the GPU from your local online shop (Amazon is overpriced), remove 3 screws to open the case and plop in the new card. This doesn't take more than 15 minutes and you're good to go.