Semi-commercial embroidery machine for merch?

I've been embroidering for a while as I was working for some time in digitizing industry (it was a small local business). But there's always room for improvement, so since I'm a novice - I came here.

As I've already mentioned in my intro, the point is that I'm an artist and I'd like to make my own merch at home, so my followers could support my projects. It'd be t-shirts at first, bags, hats and such later. Designs would be pretty basic, like my comic book logo, schematic coat of arms and such. I plan to make designs from scratch. I have previously worked with Wilcom e4 and Embird.

To prevent any questions, I know the risks, I weighed my options. And I want to try something new.

But here comes the trickiest part, which equipment I should use for this job? From what I found most users here use commercial embroidery machines but I'm sure that it'd be an overkill in my case. At least for now.
I need a good quality machine something between domestic and industrial that would be work with e4 designs and common file formats. I would like to keep it under $1000 for a no-pro device but it purely depends on an option - I'd be able to stretch my budget a bit.

I'll appreciate any help/advice I can get.
If there's already a topic with recommendations, feel free to reply with a link to it as I could probably miss it.

Thanks in advance!