This is basically my experience as well.

Tho I won’t be paying for a vpn service anymore now that PIA sold out, I’m going to set up the automated stuff and subscribe to Usenet indexers or whatever (I haven’t had a lot of time to look into it yet, but I have a bunch of info saved from a very kind person who helped me) instead because they will do what I want a lot better, automatically, and less risky apparently - no uploading and no seed ratio to maintain.

Beyond that, I do have a ps+ premium account because I will easily play $86 worth of games in a year (already have in the 2 months I’ve had it, with no effort of going to a place and hoping to find the games used. Im a collector, but I’m also not well off financially) but I otherwise go out of my way to avoid subscriptions and recurring payments.

If I need to pay for it more than once to have a better experience than FOSS, piracy, or just not having it, I’m not interested.

I paid $100 for a Plex lifetime subscription 10 years ago, not a penny since. I rave about the service to people, and get friends to sign up to use mine - and I always tell them if they like it, buy it outright. It’s stable and worth it, and if it dies tomorrow, I’d still be pleased with my purchase. If that hadn’t been an option I probably would have switched a long time ago when I learned there were FOSS options.