Yes and no. You need to consider the entirety of your application. All you have mentioned so far is that you want to connect to a particular chip that uses a UART serial interface.
What else do you want to do? Display information on a LCD? Store data for months/years in a way that survives power failures? connects to something via WiFI, USB, Ethernet? Performs complex calculations?
Once you have considered al that the complete system has to do, then you an determine a suitable MCU with the required modules, memory etc..
Also this you need to consider what you consider 'costly'. For some, this might be a few cents, or dollars, or 10's of dollars etc. Also the cost of the MCU is often not the most costly part and scrimping a few cents on the MCU might end up costing more than you save.
Also if this is for a hobby, then you might be able to reuse the parts when you have finished. If this is for a commercial products, then cost might be an issue but so it reliability, perhaps 'in field' firmware upgrades, repairability etc..
Susan