We are required by our town to keep the chickens from free-ranging, but we also have plenty of airborne predators around, so to maximize their run space we built a cheap fence with chicken wire and metal posts, and used baseball-style poultry netting on top. But here's the nice part: we have an old barn vent cap, about seven feet high, from my spouse's childhood farm barn (the barn was torn down a few years ago and her parents graciously let us take the cap). It provides shelter, and the top of it forms a nice pinnacle in the center of the enclosure. I made "tentpoles" out of a couple of old bird feeder poles and some 8 foot lengths of cheap 2 x 2 -- I cut off about a foot, screwed it on to the top to make a "t", and then buried the pole about a foot deep, using the tension from the netting on top. The netting is stretchy, so allows shaping. The tricky part was getting it over the whole fence enclosure first, but we zip tied as we went and then shaped it with the "tent poles".
What's nice about this is it allows the birds plenty of space to fly around, head room for humans, and it looks reasonably nice. It's not going to keep a determined raccoon, etc. out, but that's what the coop is for. And again, cost-effective
To discourage the local hawks (and occasional eagle) from diving down and getting entangled in the netting, we put some cheap holographic-silver pinwheels on top of the coop, the barn vent cap, and our "tent poles" to spin when it's windy and add glare. This just adds to the circus-tent like feel of the enclosure, of course!
We'll see how long this lasts but we have plenty of extra netting for patches as required.
