I haven’t done imaging for a few years now, but it used to be that you needed at least one volume license for imaging rights. (The license center only allows you to buy five licenses, but you can do one VL and four of the cheapest thing you can find.) I think you should be able to use the builtin OEM licenses for activation.
Personally, I wouldn’t bother messing with custom images, unless there’s a particular setup you want them all to have right away. I’d just use a plain image and script everything else. I’d use WDS if you want to use the full Windows stack, or FOG if you prefer.
Also to piggy back off the WDS thing, SCCM (I believe) is included with Windows Volume Licensing so you could also use Task Sequences as a route to image. I built our whole imaging setup with it and only had to build one baked image because the OS needed like 120 pieces of software or something crazy like that. That’s obviously not all that it does but I prefer the flexibility of SCCM’s management alongside the imaging.
Edit: yeah it’s included if you use Microsoft 365.
Thanks, that does look powerful, but also big and complicated. We are at most provisioning a few boxes a week, and I am really just looking for the easiest way to not have to set them all up from scratch. As the company grows, I can see the benefit to learning and utilizing a tool like SCCM.