More affordable deep ITM leaps to trade than SPY with decent liquidity?

I have been getting into options as a way to cheaply somewhat mimic leverage but my problem right now is barrier to entry. Long term I pretty much just want to roll leaps on a portion of my holdings (in case of catastrophic loss I want money to keep repeating) while I still have 30+ year time horizon and stop when I get within like 10 years of retirement and big losses would be tougher to come back from.

Right now I concede I don’t know enough to proceed but I can look at returns on options vs the index and I like how the hypothetical returns look at around strike 50% of current price with prettt low breakeven compared to holding the stock and decent amplified gains going past that.

However on SPY on options like these it’s like $30-40k due to the price of the index. Could get to that semi quickly in one of my IRAs but longer to afford that contract and not be all in on it. Worse is SPY looks like it never splits so over time it’s only getting even more expensive. I guess at some point all of retail gets priced out eventually if it never splits lol.

Struggling finding alternatives. SPYM only at $80 but LEAPS liquidity non existent. VTI kind of close with a bit better liquidity and pricing with the ETF in the $300s vs $600s. Anything else out there with a good blend of both low price and liquidity?