I think the Ranco brand controllers are supposed to be pretty cost effective if all you want is temperature control.
In my experience, heaters ALWAYS stick to "on", they never fail in the "off" setting. So what I do is I have my controller set to keep the tank at something like 78 f and then set the temperatures on the individual heaters to something like 82f. That way, if the aquarium controller fails and leaves them on, the setting on the actual heaters should stop them from cooking the tank. Just adds a level of redundancy and safety to keep from having the cheapest piece of your setup destroy everything else.
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