I like to use a bit of gesso...and my tub of Claudine Hellmuth Gesso has lasted me nearly a year and I am only just near the bottom - I don't use loads but it is often on my pages. The difference between Gesso and white acrylic is not huge (unless you are an artist in which case you often use gesso to prime your canvases) - the things that I noticed are that gesso is slightly runnier than acrylic, and slightly more transparent which can be useful with some of the techniques you use it for.
For the page above I did some basic printing with gesso. I stripped down a piece of corrugated card and then painted it with gesso and printed it on my page. You can also use milk bottle tops like in my Glitz retreat class, and one of my favourite parts from the class - you can also put it on your fingers and then just brush it onto the edge of papers and flowers to add a painty effect - so don't just think brushes and paint :)
As well as that gesso works really well for scrapping across surfaces - you can use an old credit card or stiff cardboard and then add some gesso and scrape it across the page . This works well on plain card stock or textured cardstock or patterned paper (sometimes I use it just to dull down the pattern a bit around where I want the photo) - each method gives a slightly different look - here are a couple of examples
And as in both the pages above you can just water it down a little to add some paint flicks too.