No. You can start whenever you like, and your progress will be dictated by your motivation. However, the older you get, the more difficult it is to learn new coordinations. Our brain is 'wired' to learn new coordinations best when people are young. But I don't imagine you're THAT old anyways.
Lesson costs will depend on the instructor. If you're going to spend money on lessons at all, you should seek out a qualified instructor. It may seem like a good deal to get lessons for $20/h, but if a person is charging that, he or she probably isn't really that qualified or competent. Seek out an instructor with a university degree in piano or pedagogy if you can. You can expect to pay at least $40/h for such a person. My rate is currently $52/h. As a beginner, you'd be looking at one half-hour lesson per week, so your weekly cost if you were studying with me would be $26.
Although you can learn the basics of piano playing on your own with a self-taught course (book or internet), this approach is very inefficient, and you can expect your progress to be much slower and your eventual success to be limited. If you just want to learn to fool around on the piano, it's better to take this route, as it is cheaper. Frankly, I don't want to be wasting my time teaching people who just want to fool around when there are others who are serious about learning to play well, and I don't know of many professional instructors who would. Amateur instructors would be happy to take your money, though.
The problem with trying to learn on your own is that learning any instrument is more about physical technique than it is about 'knowing' what to do. Developing physical technique without guidance is really, really difficult, firstly because you can't keep track of everything that's going on as you play, and secondly because it is more or less impossible to describe how to conquer physical difficulties with a 'catch-all' book or something. Every student I have ever taught has a particular set of strengths and weaknesses when it comes to physical approach, and so although there are some COMMON issues that need to be addressed in every student, I find that these issues must be addressed in different ways for different students. You can't get that with self-study, and for that matter, you really can't be sure that you're doing it the right way. It's REALLY easy to develop bad habits to the point that they feel perfectly natural. You won't think you're doing anything wrong, but you obviously won't be able to see the bigger picture. What serves you well playing little kiddie pieces may be totally inadequate for more difficult repertoire - in fact, that is usually the case. The primary frustration students have when first learning to play piano is that much of what their instructor will ask them to do FEELS un-unatural at first by comparison to what the student would do without guidance. But if you don't learn to play in that 'un-natural' way, you'll never end up playing naturally.:P
Just have fun, whatever you do. Music is a joy if you put in the effort to learn to play it well.
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