A few years ago, services like Apple Music and Netflix made me drop piracy. A low fee on my credit card to get convenient access to all I wanted.

Now there are 5 different streaming services with atrocious pricing. Apple Music keeps removing songs I like, YouTube Music is flawed and I’d rather not listen to music than use Spotify.

Oh but that’s not all - your weather app, social media platforms, a simple note taking app, Microsoft office, Adobe, everything is a subscription.

Got a new phone? Better pay for cloud services or it will literally start hammering you with notifications to get more storage everyday.

Guess what - I’m now back to zero subscriptions and a lot, and I do mean a lot, of pirated content on my Jellyfin server.

You know my story isn’t very different from yours.

As a teenager I massively pirated everything, became an adult with a paying job streaming was sensible so I paid for Netflix/Spotify eventually adding in Prime video + the occasional thing like P+/disney+ or whatever flavour of the month I wanted to watch.

Then earlier this year I realised I was paying for 6 different movie/tv streaming subs and when I went on holiday none of the services I had worked properly and I couldn’t continue watching the show I had been watching at night before bed and I just went nah fuck this. Blew about 2 grand on a Mac Mini m2 and a ton of hard drives and just went full on Arr stack + usenet + plex lifetime.

It isn’t even about the fucking money anymore it’s just how inconvenient they make everything, I’ve had enough and I don’t think I’m ever going back.

Disney Plus straight up refusing to run anything while we were on vacation just made me really mad. Here I am setting up the tablet for the kid, and then - nah wrong region mate. Even VPN didn’t help somehow.