An "epically frugal" bean recipe that uses canned instead of dried??
Nothing wrong with canned beans, but if you want to get both the cheapest and best tasting result, use dried. Remember the following and you won't need to rely on recipes:
Soak them in salted water overnight or while you're at work, or don't if you don't mind them taking a bit longer to cook. The smaller/thinner the bean, the less soaking they need. Lentils don't need soaking at all.
Dried beans absorb flavor like champs and are basically a blank slate to do what you want. Treat the liquid you cook them in like you would a soup: add seasoning, aromatics, vegetables, spices. For a rich flavor, add bones with bits of meat on them if you have any, or the stub of some hard cheese, or a dollop of olive oil, butter, or bacon fat.
Cook low and slow and taste regularly until the beans have the texture you like. You're going to remove all the solids but the beans and strain the broth, but do not throw out that broth. You'll have so much flavor in there you can use it as a base later, or cook rice/noodles in it, or add it to literally anything that needs liquid flavor injection. Refrigerate/freeze the beans in this broth.
For bonus tightwad points, save all the ends of vegetables and parsley stems and cooked meat bones from your day-to-day cooking in a freezer bag. When the freezer bag is full, you just drop that into water with the beans and you basically have a "free" stock.