I bought a
Tooltop T5 recently from AliExpress. It's 256*192 in resolution and was around $150. It's a "phone camera", though.
It supposedly has a macro lens built-in because it is allegedly built for PCB inspection/repair.
In my opinion it works decently. I don't have experience with other thermal cameras to compare, but it's been very useful already in analyzing the thermal behavior of modules and circuits I build or use. It's actually very sensitive, to the point of detecting the exact point on a DIP atmega microcontroller where the sillicon die is, because of the heat it generates under the black plastic.
There's a couple of apps apart from the "official" app that works with this camera, and there's even PC software that I tried, that allowed me to record and analyze the direct video feed from the device. This is a common theme with generic USB-C "phone" thermal cameras because (with some exceptions) they mostly seem to work as a grayscale camera where white = hot, black = cold, and since there's apparently many cameras operating in this exact same way, you get (in theory) a variety of compatible software and apps.
Now, I do agree that a dedicated camera is better, however I had an old phone laying around that I repurposed to be a thermal camera with the addition of this device. I wouldn't use my personal phone for this. Not only hovering my phone over my soldering/repair station would be incredibly bad for my heart, but also I don't want to get notifications or calls on my "thermal camera" while I'm troubleshooting an issue
Other than that, phone thermal cameras have some advantages: Bigger screen than most dedicated devices, large storage space for captures, they can be connected to cloud storage for even more captures as well as enjoying instant transfer to your PC, and in some cases, if you don't like the app there's maybe another one that would work better for you (only if the device is generic enough).
There's definitely some annoyances like having to lock auto-rotation, disable phone updates, etc, but it has its advantages too, especially if you are reusing an old phone that had no other fate than collecting dust in a drawer.