My low cost solution has been adding external mechanical disks. Those go up to several TB for cheap, so I put two and sync them with rsync weekly in case one suddenly fails.

As others have wisely said, keep the fast SSD for your OS, media rarely changes and is usually accessed sequentially, it can live in slower disks.

I find Jellyfin’s subtitle search much better than Plex’s. Bonus for leaving a subtitle file right along with your file, instead of buried somewhere else so you can’t easily edit it.

Plex is more polished, but I love Jellyfin’s subtitle search; it blows Plex’s socks away.

Also, Jellyfin doesn’t nag me every effing time to enable DRM in Firefox for some unfathomable reason.

But Plex definitely wins on performance, IMO.

Take HomeAssistant for example: you’re free to use it self-hosted, but as soon as you want to expose it securely through the Internet, there’s need for infrastructure that has costs, both in materials and labor. In HomeAssistant’s case, it’s NabuCasa that does it, and costs money, and helps fund the work of HomeAssistant’s developers.

Having things free (libre) and open source is a blessing, but we have become used, entitled, even spoiled, to enjoy the work of very specialized people for free. That’s not always feasible.

Another example, Zabbix, is totally open source and free, they only charge for support and training if you ask for them. It has worked for them for many years, but if they start to struggle with funding, I’d understand if they charged for it.