VDI licensing

The situation:
Single VM as a jumpbox for 20-30 users on busy days. We want to move to a VDI environment with 2-3 smaller VMs. However, our M365 Standard license does not seem to support this scenario. Specificaly because of Windows licensing.

Questions:
What's the cheapest way to get around this? Suck it up and buy the premium licenses, which will baloon the cost?
Continue running on VMs, but scale them down, provision a few more and load balance the RDP connection? And with scheduled startup/shutdown of the machines