Typography is the first thing a reader sees and almost never the first thing a designer fixes. Bad type is read as carelessness before anything is consciously read at all. Good type is read as competence before a single sentence has been parsed.
This is not snobbery. It is signal. The reader is making a judgement about the institution behind the page in the half-second before their eyes settle into the prose.
Spend the budget on the type. The trust dividend is enormous and almost entirely subconscious.
