-One wash cycle in warm water using no soap.
-One wash cycle in hot water using soap.
-Dry
Every couple weeks we would put white vinegar in the no-soap cycle. This helps cut the smell down.
Every couple months we would put a small amount of bleach in the no-soap cycle. Any more frequent than this and we found the diapers then irritated our son's skin.
If I had to do it all over again, not sure how I would choose. As you call out, there are additional costs to the cloth diaper approach (water, detergent, etc) that add up, plus it takes quite a bit of time.
One advantage that we found is that our son, and other folks we know who used cloth diapers, all had kids who ended up potty training sooner (anywhere from a couple months to 6+ months earlier) than kids wearing disposables.
What we ended up doing was 1 "power wash" cycle, followed by a regular wash cycle each time, and just regular ol Tide detergent. Sorry for the tide ad.
Short answer: it's hard to say specifically, because it depends on a ton of factors.
As for the other stuff, we used a double-rinse with powdered detergent and things seemed to work pretty well.
The time factor was _super_ annoying. Maintenance for cloth diapers is a full-time job sometimes, but it felt good not to add a billion pounds of waste to the landfill.
Full disclosure: Now that we travel a lot more, we're pretty much only in disposables.
How do you get the cloth diapers clean? Like, really clean so they don't still smell after they've been cleaned?
My wife and I were planning on cloth diapering. We bought some high-end cloth diaper and liners and started on our merry way. We found that no matter what we did, our little guy smelled like piss all the time. My wife was washing diapers 2 or 3 times in between wearings, "stripping" them to remove remaining smells, etc., etc.
Our water bill went up by literally $50 a month, we were buying all kinds of detergents to try and get the smells to go away, and we had already invested a ton of money actually buying diapers in the first place. Not to mention that my wife was spending all her time washing, re-washing, and folding diapers _and_ our kid still smelled like piss.
In our case, disposables were a god-send. The little dude is happy, he doesn't smell, my wife doesn't spend half her day cleaning diapers, and (especially since we buy diapers in bulk on good sales), we've found disposable diapers to actually be far _cheaper_ than what we were paying for water, detergent, startup costs, etc. on cloth.
I would never go back, just because of the time savings alone.