https://lichess.org is an excellent open source chess server with plenty of learning resources for pure beginners.
As you progress learning resources sadly get more and more expensive indeed. Not to mention the cost of tournaments (travel and accomodation expenses add up very quickly).
The biggest thing is to not focus too much on openings. Past 4 or so moves everything can be mixed up and tactics are more important.
You're at the level where you're probably not hanging all your pieces or hanging mate-in-one too commonly. So learn endgames. You can win/draw like 75% of the time from even being down a piece or two at your level if you can play the endgame quickly and accurately.
Then, refine the middlegame, learning how to get the advantage. Doing puzzles for dozens of hours will teach you how to recognize a lot of basic tactics that can win early.
But only once you've scraped the barrel with the middlegame would I start focusing strongly on openings.
Thanks, great advices, I will follow them.
Yes, I'm through the trivial things that's why I feel that I've got stuck.
Probably I spent too much time playing and not enough practicing.
What you write makes a lot of sense, I know the very basics of end game play, but not on my level for example, and just playing against people doesn't give me the consistency I need to get better faster.
The same with tactics, I can spend many hours playing with other people and I'm getting better with tactics, but again it's not enough to get consistent with pattern recognition.
Of all the games, chess is a pretty well-distributed one. Maybe not quite as cheap to set up as football, but it's pretty close. You can create a board and pieces out of two sheets of paper and a pen.
Learning it is tougher of course!
For me as a hobbyist it's so hard to know what to learn and even to know what level the teacher should be.
I'm at 1200 in lichess, tried for example multiple ,,beginner friendly'' openings, like London / Kings Indian defense, but I realized that as four knights opening is the most natural for me, I should focus on the Italian, which is the closest to my natural style of play.
Also there are tactics practice, books, videos, but I get discourage when I see how fast some people are advancing (especially as I'm in my 40s).