USB mic under USD 120 for meetings and occasional recording: where does quality stop improving? Microphones

The improvement curve flattens hard somewhere around fifty to seventy dollars for a USB dynamic, and everything above that in your range is buying build quality, a better headphone monitoring path and a nicer stand mount rather than a different sound. Thin and distant is almost always distance rather than the capsule: get the mic within about a hand span of your mouth and slightly off axis so you are not breathing into it. That single change does more than the whole price range you are considering.

One thing people forget: whatever you buy, check that your conferencing software is not aggressively processing it. Most of the platforms apply their own noise suppression and gating by default and they will happily undo the thing you just paid for, chopping the start of words. Find the setting, choose the original-sound or high-fidelity option for recordings, and test with an actual recording rather than by asking a colleague whether you sound better.

Buy a dynamic rather than a condenser at this budget and in that room. A condenser will pick up the carpet, the radiator, the keyboard and whatever is happening two rooms away, and then you will spend your evenings on noise suppression. A dynamic hears mostly what is directly in front of it, which is exactly what an untreated rented room needs.

Went from a headset to a mid-priced USB dynamic last year for exactly your use case and the two things that surprised me were how much the boom arm mattered and how much I use the headphone jack on the mic for monitoring. The sound difference was real but smaller than the ergonomics difference.

Also spend fifteen dollars of your budget on something soft behind you rather than in front. A bookcase, a curtain, a coat on a hook: anything that stops the wall directly opposite the mic reflecting your voice straight back into it.