The poor Mans Patent
Actually it does exist. It's called a Provisional Patent and only costs 105 dollars to apply. However, there are some significant downsides to using this approach. You have 1 year to file for a full Patent, if you don't follow through your idea is up for grabs for anyone who's read your provisional. Yeah, there are outfits who's wole purpose is to scan the Provisional Patents and file on good ideas the originator couldn't afford to patent.
BTW, I've actually done some looking into getting a patent. Unfortunately, in my case getting a full patent would cost well north to 75K because I'd need to go international. My particular idea has the potential of increasing the cruise fuel efficiency of a gasoline engine by at least 30%. Bad news is it will probably run about 2 million to put together a working engine that uses this idea.
Now, here is one approach you may want to consider. That is to file for a Provisional and then take that to a Venture Capital firm to get the funding for a full Patent and build some working prototypes. If it's a really good solid and innovative idea, there are Venture firms that will take a risk on something like this. Downside is that you'll have to sign away some or all of your rights to the Patent to the Venture firm in return for their money.
The other approach is to put together a working model, make sure it works as envisioned, and then pool a group of family and friends to obtain the funds for a full patent who then have a share in any proceeds resulting from that Patent.