My band all pitched in together and we bought ourselves a Tascam 2488 NEO 24 track recorder that we leave set up in our practice studio for recording. Though we don't actually mix down on it even though we could, but our bass player has a ProTools setup at home and takes it home to dump to ProTools and mixes down on that.

The band had been talking about going into a studio to record demos but I said screw paying for that when you can buy a 24 track recorder for $600 nowadays. Portastudios have really come a long way over the years. Pro studios are fine if you have a LOT of money you can afford to spend. We don't.