Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.
Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.
Just started crocheting, and I’m just holding myself back from buying all the yarn, it’s gonna get bad
My mom knits and she spends way more time unraveling thrift store finds to salvage the yarn than she does actually knitting stuff.
Running.
Was supposed to be the cheapest way to get exercise. You can do it right from your front door, no gym subscriptions, no specialized equipment (some people will tell you you don’t even need shoes), and it’s far and away the best time-value exercise I’ve ever found. You can get away with like 20 minutes 3-4 times a week and be doing great.
Well, turns out I love running and I love distance running so I’m now putting up enough miles to need new shoes 2-3 times a year, a nice Garmin smart watch and heart rate monitor to track my progress, sign-ups for several long-distance races each year, shorts, socks, you get the picture.
Could I do it cheaper? Yeah. But at the end of the day it’s a hobby and I like it
Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting
I needed a new saucepan.
I’ve now replaced half my kitchen.
Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)
…anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.
2000 into my fully automated hydroponic weed factory. Another 500 to make my nutrient solutions from scratch. Mind you that 500 dollars when making from scratch likely last 20 years of crops. It does make a good 1.5 pounds of dry weed every 3 to 4 months with the for legal plants allowed in Canada. I barely smoke so give nearly all away.
Three year prior, harvested a crop down right before going to Mexico for three month trip. Was still some shoots barely growing so for shits and giggles I turn the lights back to 22 hours per day to see if they would go back to the veg state. Have camera so can watch it remotely. Shit starts fully growing like a new plant. Anyhow COVID puts a wrinkle in my return. Ended up in Mexico for 18 months. Over that time, thing kept growing like nuts. Automation on water replacement and nutrient injection along with pH monitoring. Became sort of a how long can this thing go with near zero human intervention. Had only to send my brother in law in three times to cut it down and refill my nutrient injectors from solutions I made before leaving.
I unintentionally grow weed because I made some tincture for grandma.
Now it just grows on my garden and I can’t get rid of it.
I bought myself a raspberry pi for my birthday a few years ago.
I now have thousands of dollars in hardware sitting in a server rack in my office. Whoops.
Electronics / microcontrollers.
Took just a few months to go from, “I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?” to “oscilloscopes cost how much?”
Has there already grown a noteworthy Arduino/ESP Community on Lemmy?
Data hoarding and self-hosting every service under the sun.
Surprised there’s no reef tank people here. Imagine spending $5000 on a 20 gallon fish tank - BEFORE spending any money on corals.
Ya it CAN be done for $50, but nobody does that.
Coffee. I’m in a coffee producing country. It could be as cheap as grabbing a bag from the coffee institute (really good and cheap), a cloth filter and call it a day. Instead, I’m on my second espresso machine, fourth grinder, second portafilter set, and have all the doodads to make it just how I like it.
I will buy a Ubiquiti edge router to move away from the consumer grade network gear, turned into just one more $500 server to complete my homelab cluster. Oh who am I kidding the homelab is never “complete”.
PLANTS, LOTS OF THEM
My grandma got me 3 ducklings in 2019 for no reason. 3 ducks don’t cost very much. The issue is, that she unlocked a passion. I now have 12 ducks. I want more, but I don’t have the money or space.
selfhosting/homelab. Originally started just using retired gaming PC parts to build a server. All it cost was the power to run the system. Years later and with more things/content I have, I just added a 5x 18tb hard drives and 3x 8tb. Just the 5 18tb drives was like $1500.
