PSA you can still get Gamepass Ultimate for cheap. This is your last opportunity to stock up (I think September 14th is the cutoff).
Find some cheap Xbox Gold cards (sites like cdkeys or eneba). It’s a little trickier but cdkeys usually sells the cards from the Turkey region super cheap but you have to redeem over VPN.
3 months of gold converts into 50 days of Gamepass Ultimate. Depending on the price you should be able to get 3 years for $200 or less. Careful to not go over, you can’t redeem past 3 years.
Edit
PSA #2
If you already have Gamepass take part in rewards. You can earn enough points throughout the month to self fund your gamepass subscription or other purchases for free (I cashed in my rewards points recently to get that dope Starfield controller and the Starfield early access upgrade).
Here’s my 4 main avenues for points:
Xbox mobile app: go to your profile icon and do everything in the rewards tab. I usually leave Vampire Survivors idling on my PC for the PC game task.
Edge mobile app: click the search icon on the home screen and scroll down to the news stories, click through them. Till you get your mobile & edge searches (think it’s about 20). Then go up to the top right menu and open rewards. Do everything in here. The top 3 items you usually have to actually do (quizzes and polls). The rest you can just click into and back out of.
**Bing mobile app: ** click rewards and collect the daily check-in points then click earn to read. Open a news article and scroll to the bottom, it’ll open the next article (you need 10 of these).
Xbox. Get the rewards app. Do everything in here. Mostly just clicking boxes. Go to the Xbox activities box in the bottom right, you’ll find some rewards to earn in games. There’s also a daily 50 for earning an achievement. Rare Replay gives you an achievement for every game you open and Killer Instinct has several quick achievements for every single fighter.
It sounds like a lot but the mobile app stuff only takes about 10 mins. I usually do it while I’m waking up in bed and the Xbox stuff takes another 10 minutes usually do this before work.
If you max out your points you can easily get $15-20 a month.