When people talk about cheap knives they usually mean two very different things. Inexpensive and cheaply made are not the same thing. There are quality knives you can buy for forty dollars. There are cheaply made knives that cost three hundred. A budget is a perfectly reasonable constraint. Skimping on quality is not.
I carry a knife every second I am awake. Most days it does mundane work. Packages. Bagels. A fish or two when the creek is cooperating. Nothing that would trouble a pair of office scissors. But a handful of times over the years it has been asked to do real work. Not every one of those moments was life or death. A few were close.
In those moments a knife must do three things without hesitation. It must open. It must be sharp. It must not break. Everything else, the fit of the handle, the finish of the blade, the pedigree of the steel, is decoration until those three are satisfied.
It must open. It must be sharp. It must not break. Everything else is decoration until those three are satisfied.
A knife is a tool
I like my carry knife. I probably love it, in the quiet way a person loves the objects that have been with them for a long time. But if the moment required it, I would break it without a second thought. That is what a tool is for.
This is the line between a safe queen and a daily driver. The safe queen exists to be admired. The daily driver exists to be used up, if the day ever comes. Most days it will not. Some days it will. You do not get to choose which day.
Where not to save money
There are places in life to save a few dollars. The things that might save your life are not one of them. Guns. Knives. Tires. Shoes. Helmets. Locks. A short list. You go through your whole life hoping you will never need to use most of them in the way they were designed to be used. Until one day, maybe, you will.
You hope you never need to cut a seat belt to get out of a burning car. You hope you are never the uncle with the small pocket knife trying to free a child's hair from a pool drain. You hope you never watch an ordinary afternoon turn into a terrible one in a crowded place, the way the brave souls at Old Dominion did. If any of those days arrive, the tool in your pocket has to work. Not probably. Not usually. Every time.
If that is the cost, eat ramen for an extra few weeks. Put off the new phone. The knife you will still be carrying a decade from now is not the place to save forty bucks.
What you do not need
You do not need super steel. The marketing around MagnaCut, S110V, M4, all of it, is aimed at collectors and enthusiasts. A properly heat treated CPM 154, a good D2, even decent 8Cr13MoV, will serve any honest person better than most will admit. Steel is the smallest part of the decision.
You need fit. A handle that fits your hand and stays there when it is wet. You need a good opening. Whatever the mechanism, it has to work without fuss, every time, with one hand, in the dark, when your adrenaline is up. You need a strong lock. If the lock gives, the knife closes on your fingers at the worst possible moment.
Or, simpler still, carry a fixed blade. A fixed blade has no mechanism to fail because it has no mechanism.
On origin
I will admit to a little country of origin snobbery. Certain places have traditions that produce reliably good knives. Seki, Japan. Solingen, Germany. Sheffield on a good day. The American custom makers. Northern Italy. Scandinavia. If I am buying a knife I have never held, those provenances buy my trust quickest.
But quality comes from everywhere, and ugly surprises come from everywhere. There are Chinese makers turning out exceptional work at prices that would make a Solingen shop blush. There are American factories coasting on a brand name. You have to learn to read the object in front of you, not the sticker on the box.
City and backwoods
There is a myth that you carry a tough knife in the woods and a polite one in the city. It is the opposite of the truth. The woods are full of things that can be solved with a fire and a cool head. A city, on a strange night, can be a less forgiving place than an unfamiliar trail. I carry the same quality blade wherever I am. If it is good enough for the alley it is good enough for the elk camp.
Carry something you trust. Maintain it. Know it. When the day you have been hoping to avoid arrives, and it probably will not, and then one day it will, a knife you have trusted every day for ten years is worth more than the finest thing you bought the week before.