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.
Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting
Gardening.
Containers are surprisingly expensive. And you need a lot of soil to fill them, which gets expensive too. Then it’s impossible to only buy the seeds you need, when there are so many cool varieties…
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.
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.
I needed a new saucepan.
I’ve now replaced half my kitchen.
Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.
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?
Coffee.
I blame James Hoffman entirely.
Within a year I went from:
Drinking instant coffee at home, but really enjoying “proper coffee”
To
Buying a cafetiere (~£15) + preground coffee
To
Buying a Nespresso (~£60 on offer) + pods
To
Buying a budget espresso machine (~£120) + preground coffee
To
Wasting my money on a cheap manual coffee grinder (~£50) + beans
To
Immediately replacing it with an entry level Sage grinder (~£170)
To
Buying an entry Level “proper” espresso machine (~£700)
It took me a good 2-3 weeks of practicing and dialling in before pulling a good shot of coffee that I’d actually want to drink, but by that point it was also about learning a new skill, learning how different aspects of the process affect the end result and learning how to make all sorts of different espresso-based drinks.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts at first, but a year or so later even she agrees it was worth the investment. I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
The problem is now though that I’m a waaaay more critical of coffee from coffee shops, because I spent a long time making bad coffee whilst learning!
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.
This is not the first post where I feel it but I love it so much that we have a lot of people on Lemmy that can talk about things not related to computers!
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.
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.
For me it is maybe camping.
I just tested my new sleeping bag - under 0.5kg rated to -5°C. And realised that I bought/ replaced lots of gear to higher quality gear over few years.
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
