I am getting ready to renew, in April. My renewal will be a total of $80 for the year -- this includes the XF forum, plus Enhanced Search and Media Gallery add-ons.
My site is also very heavy on images in proportion to my number of members and post/thread count, etc. What I did was to set up a VPS, but "offload" the images to a block storage volume that I attached directly to my VPS file system. This allows a much smaller (less resourced) VPS system, but yet I have fully expandable and highly performant storage that I can upgrade as my image count grows.
I upgraded from vB 4.2.4 on managed hosting exactly a year ago, and haven't looked back since. Didn't lose a single image in the import. The support (as has been said) here has been excellent, both from the XF side (folks like
@Brogan) as well as the community of members and developers, and the knowledge base.
After migrating it can take a bit of time to "fine tune" things (permissions, and so forth) and to find a palette of add-ons that mirror some of the built-in fuctionality of vB, if that is important to you. The good thing is that there is a very robust ecosystem of developers who are active in creating and supporting XF add-ons, so you can definitely find what you need in most cases.
Good luck !!