Just a note, sailing the seas safely is fairly easy today but unless you want a more involved setup and only want to keep unwatched or unwatched plus a few "keep forever" shows, the cost of hardware is not going to be much "cheaper".
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.
I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.
Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.