this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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[–] Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So, in the US, a standalone, bare-minimum with ads included Disney+ subscription costs $9.99. Oops, actually we're raising it to $11.99 TOMORROW! So after a paying for a year of Dinsey's cheapest plan, you'd have paid $144.

But maybe Disney isn't your thing? Well. Netflix costs $7.99 for the ad plan, and $17.99 for the no ads plan. But do note, even on the ad supported plan, you STILL can't watch everything.

Ad-supported, all mobile games and most movies and TV shows are available. A lock icon will appear on unavailable titles.

Ranges $96-216 per year for ads or no ads.

Like anime? Crunchyroll offers a $7.99 plan, but it might not have all the content, so then there's the $11.99 plan. So $96-144 per year. But their catalog doesn't even have every fucking anime, and they've let dubbing go to the wayside after buying out their main competitor, Funimation (in which we lost several anime due to licensing).

Listen to music on top of that? Spotify for non-students ($5.99) costs $11.99, so $144 in a year. YT music is $10.99 for non-students, so $132

So say you listen to Spotify, like anime, and watch Netflix, you're paying at minimum $336 per year, on the cheapest plans available, which usually have ads or missing features.

I've been looking at Optiplex and Lenovo ThinkCentres on ebay recently, and for my bare minimum standards of 1. Can support virtualization, 2. Can do Intel quick sync video and encode HEVC 10-bit (So about 10 year old devices) the prices range around $90-$150. Some 2TB HDDs would be about $100. You'd probably be pirating since most of the new shows on streaming services have no physical media to buy/no way of just owning a movie or TV box set. Even then, outright buying music and movies is cheaper in the long run. Anything you already own can be added to your library. You'll never be told that "oops we didn't pay to re-up our access to that movie, so it's gone!" You'll never have new ads, paywalled features, limited devices, or other bullshit. The server is up whenever you want it to be, provided you can handle being tech support.

So in the end, a home server + drives costs less than paying for several services where you own shit, and they can cut features or raise the price any day. But yes, we're just being conceited assholes.