Update: My neighbor Gene told me to skip the fancy rain barrel and just use a trash can. He was right.
Gene lives two doors down and has been catching rainwater in a 55 gallon drum for 12 years. When I was about to drop $180 on a cedar barrel online, he told me to grab a $22 plastic trash can from the hardware store on 5th and drill one hole near the top. It's been 4 months and that thing has caught over 300 gallons for my tomatoes, plus the lid keeps the mosquitoes out. Anyone else doing cheap rain setups, or is there a reason people still pay for the fancy ones?
My grandpa did something like this back in the 90s but with old milk jugs cut in half, lined up under his gutter downspout. Neighbors thought he was nuts until his green beans came in twice as big as everyone else's that summer. He never spent a dime on them either, just poked holes in the bottoms and set them on some bricks. The whole setup lasted him like six years before the plastic got brittle and cracked. Gene sounds like the kind of guy who figured out what my grandpa knew, that water is water no matter what fancy thing holds it.