My advice would be to use the gear you already have and be able to get every sound out of it you can before buying stuff you may not need.

An example would be to use the guitar controls as Joe Bonamassa explains here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkGCvLstPrE

And set yourself a goal, only allow yourself to buy a pedal AFTER you can easily do this...
* Dial in a driven tone in your amp, but not ridiculous gain
* Dial back your guitar volume and tone to get a nice crunchy edge of breakup tone.  Play some rhythm guitar chops
* Dial your guitar volume up and play some lead chops.  Then dial back to the previous crunchy tone and play rhythm again
--- What you have done here is achieved usable AMP distortion which will sound much better than pedal distortion (maybe after upgrading your amp)
--- This is a hugely useful skill

And also try to dial-in your amp to an appropriate setting and use guitar volume/tone that JoeB demonstrated.  You have to experiment more to get your single volume/tone controls and pickup controls to get the sounds Joe did, but most of them can be done with a Tele.  A quick YouTube search yields...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMnDzEmgUPY

What Joe did not explain is that you need to set your amp to the dirtiest setting that you want to use, then fiddle with the guitar controls to dial the amp back from that.

If you buy pedals AFTER doing these then you will also be able to use them much more efficiently, get more tones, etc.

Good luck with your experiments and remember to use what you already have.  Guitar YouTube channels are very good at making you want to buy stuff you don't really need.