"Avatars created by businesses can advertise work to be done as smart contracts by publishing them on their feed with hashtags" - sounds amazing. This means that you can create avatars not only for personal purposes, but also for companies. Minimal investment (enough to create an avatar) and it will help to advertise your company. Will need to pay companies extra for creating avatar? 
you can create an avatar for free, to run an Avatar node you can run on a $5/month vps server to host the node or you could run on your laptop as well. VPS server gives you better uptime.
An Avatar node is a piece of decentralized software running on a computer that
conforms to the EverLife gossip protocol and participates in the EverLife network. The software
manages the feeds of avatars the node may control and communicates with other Avatars using
a secure gossip protocol. The avatar nodes also can execute tasks using the skills that each
avatar controlled by the node has. It also can orchestrate microservices on same or other
machines to get tasks done.