I don’t know about cheaper, but Fuji, HP and photography related companies made disks.
Completely unrelated, but the SCSI versions made them pretty much plug and play with tons of hardware. There is an old Roland sampler I have made in ‘88 that uses one, and Zip disks leave floppies completely in the dust. It’s truly night and day on every level.
The rural K-8 elementary school I attended had a lab full of Mac LCIIs up through early 2000, and chose to buy a bunch of Zip drives and use them as external dedicated storage upgrades. I don’t think I ever saw anybody use them for data transfer, just storing stuff like Mario Teaches Typing and DinoPark Tycoon. Us kids were specifically instructed to never try to eject the Zip disks.
Right after I graduated, they found the budget to upgrade to blueberry iMacs. The superintendent/principal was also the only person I ever saw using a G4 Cube in the wild; that Apple salesperson must have done a hell of a job. One of the office secretaries had one of the education-market-only beige all-in-one Power Mac G3s too.
I believe sometime in the mid-2000s, they moved on to a contract with Dell like everybody else. I guess the iPad era has seen Apple regain some education market share, but they used to absolutely dominate schools.
