As carrots said, dosing is only mandatory if water changes can't keep up with replenishing those 3 key items. If the candy canes are your only stony coral, and you're doing regular water changes, then it is likely that testing to make sure you're staying in range is all that is necessary.
Should testing reveal that it is time to start dosing, once you've dialed in the amounts, you can slow the frequency of testing as long as you don't add a bunch of new alk and calcium consuming stony corals.
One can make DIY dosing solutions fairly inexpensively. And likely you're not going to be using them up quickly as compared to an sps dominant tank.
Once one has the solutions, dosing manually doesn't involve additional expense. Just make it part of your tank routines like feeding fish or something.
Having mostly lps and sps, I dose alk, ca and mag automatically via controller controlled pumps. I just keep supplement reservoirs filled and it all happens by itself.