I was looking for a hobby to get into. I live in a house with a yard where I can put up an antenna. I have a 60' long wire out a second story window right now, I use that to listen to shortwave on my SDRPlay so I do know a little bit about building antennas. How hard or $ is it to get your license? What can you get without having to learn morse code?
I currently have a little less than 40 feet of random wire outside in my small little "back yard" (if you can call it that here in Miami... its like 25 by 25 feet if that, and it has to be below my fence line and basically invisible because, you know, 5000 people per square mile etc. And I've worked just about everywhere. Obviously low power and non-optimized antennas do complicate the ability to communicate, but that is part of the challenge.
License fee can be anything that the VEC wants to charge, but typically small lunch a test attempt, and typically you can take all the tests from in one sitting for one price if you pass them all. When I first got into ham radio they had just dropped the morse code in the entry level class ("Tech No-Code") .. but still I think it is a good idea to learn. I progressed all the way to Advanced (which at the time required code).
As for preparations, there are quite a few good places online (not sure what the rules are on suggesting sites on this forum)... and there are some decent study aids on youtube as well (for the US exams). For the US exams, the FCC release the full list of all questions that you could be asked, so you could learn by rote, but of course naturally the only things that one interested in electronics really will need to 'learn' are the band limits, FCC rules etc, as the entry level electronics questions are pretty easy.
Really you will spend more on radios, especially if you are going to use random wire as you will need some sort of antenna tuner. But luckily it can last years.
All in all, I'd really recommend finding a club near you.. almost all of them help new people get started.