In my experience, pipe smoking is just not expensive enough as a hobby to bother finding ways to make it cheaper. There are a few things I do which 'cut costs' I guess, for example I will have a pair of scissors handy to chop the dirty end of a pipe cleaner sometimes, so I can reuse the rest of it at the end of a smoke...but I would not be looking to smoke out of a siliconed cob any time soon.