r/piracy, plex, sonarr, radarr, prowlerr, kometa, usenet.

Define cheap? You can pick up a $100 old gaming PC with a 1060 graphics card and a 24tb baracuda drive for $280. I run unraid but you can run regular windows or any random server software. Truenas is another popular one. You can get a r/usenet subscription for roughly $5-10 a month. Check their wiki. That'll give you access to almost everything ever. All movies and shows can be downloaded in minutes. You can torrent but I spent a year getting 100TB worth of content torrenting. I downloaded 70TB in 3 days with usenet.

That's $380 with a running charge of let's say $7 a month. Netflix premium is $25 per month. You will get that same if not better quality with piracy. It will take you 1.75 years to have your PC and hdd paid off. If you torrent and get a vpn (Proton vpn 2 year plan is $3 per month), your setup will have paid for inself in less than a year and a half.

My personal math was a lot bigger with cheaper drives. I spent 4k over 4 years on content. Not including the home lab side, I have roughly 4k into my system. All together im sitting at like 9 or 10k but plex can run on a mini PC and the drives are only about 3500. I have around 320TB worth of raw capacity and im sitting at around 150TB worth of content. 8,000 movies, 2,000 TV shows with 53,000 episodes. My goal going in was to be able to be recommended something and already have it. Ive hit that point im more surprised if I dont have it. If you have any questions, im an open book. Definitely do some research on the stuff I've listed, you'll be surprised how easy it is.