I'm modeler and I'll said the price will depend on what you are expecting. For m modeling is not the harder part, texturing and animating will cost a lot. I you aren't familliar with modeling ( take a long time to know) you could at least learn animation, It's not difficult and basicly the only thing you'll need to do is making move believable. Ventilator tutorial is a good place to start. You'll learn a lot about rigging and ik solver on blender. But then modeling if you aren't familliar with drawing could be more difficult ( for shape and anatomy) and I pretty sure you want to have at least good looking characters.
Anyway my advice is you drop the animation part to save up some money and learn yourself animation this way you won't be stuck if a idea comea up.