Metal has always been a premium to super premium choice and doesn't belong in the same sentence as budget. You might find some of the vintage 50's St. Charles metal cabinets if you search long enough, but they are collectible these days and won't be all that budget oriented either. Your best bet for budget would be a custom maker who would use laminate or metalaminate for the doors and do full overlay. There are several lines that offer metal doors, but they are about 10x as much as the wood.

How about IKEA Rubrik?

Thanks for the input. Looked at IKEA. The metal is just the door, not the cabinet frame though. Will keep looking.

Retro renovation may be a good place to look for vintage metal cabinets. Also Craigslist or Kijiji. You can have them powder coated to look like new.

Here is a link that might be useful: steel kitchens on retro renovation

There were vintage metal cabinets in my house when I moved in. Didn't take me long to tear them down. Now in a way I wished I hadn't. Especially an appx. 6' long, 2' cabinet with sliding ribbed glass doors. In fact it is still on the wall in the garage where I put it for storage and not too long ago I checked it out to see what kind of shape it is in. Fair - to poor. :( Like the others I put in the cellar, it's become even more pitted and rusted (I tossed those 5yrs. ago). My sink cabinet was metal also, my Dad built me a bead board replacement many years ago.

Nice link robotropolis.

Previous discussion of metal cabinet lines

Here is a link that might be useful: Metal Cabinets

I have a kitchen full of 1940's Youngstown Kitchens metal cabinets. We love them, we love them less at times.

Problems: All shelves are fixed, so there's no flexibility. No modern pull outs or other niceties. A couple of hinges are broken, and a drawer sticks.

Pluses: Since they are modular, I've pulled them out and rearranged them twice in the past 20 years. I'm actually in the planning stages of the dream kitchen, but since we are mostly DIY, we'll probably do things in stages - demo & reframe in the new layout- but keep the old cabinets and pop them back in into new locations, then later when the budget allows, consider replacing the cabinets. However, if I can find a good layout with the existing metal cabinets, I'd seriously consider just sandblasting & powder coating them, repairing the odd problems, and adding some of the nicer pullouts they lack.

If I don't keep them in the kitchen, they'll get reused in the basement or the garage. They are way too awesome to toss in a dumpster.