3 Ways Building A NAS Saved Me Money, Even Though It Cost Me A Lot To Get Started

Key Takeaways

Canceling game server subscriptions was the biggest savings.
NAS allows easy access to movies and TV shows collection.
No need for Google One subscription for Photo backups.

I built my NAS out of old PC parts I had lying around. While I could have sold them, I decided to go all in and buy some HDDs and get to work on making it work for me, and I’m glad to say that so far, I can already see that it’s saving me a ton of money in ways that I didn’t really think it would right away.

I run TrueNAS Scale on my NAS, but there are other options out there. This also isn’t to say you can’t buy a prebuilt NAS, but the point is that you can still save money even with a higher initial investment.

Best NAS devices in 2024

Expand your PC storage with one of these NAS enclosures

1 I canceled my game server subscriptions

I can run Minecraft and Counter-Strike from my NAS, why do I need a cloud server?

The first and most obvious saving, to me, was the fact that I could now cancel my game server subscriptions that I was running. I had a Minecraft server and a Teamspeak server, but I don’t need those given that I can now run them locally on a machine that I’m paying electricity for anyway. Even in the future, if I want to spin up a Counter-Strike 2 server to play with my friends or practice, it’s incredibly easy to do that.

This alone has been a pretty big saving, as I can even run multiple Minecraft servers. I’m running some servers for friends, for my partner, and my own, which all run from the same machine through MineOS.

Ugreen NAS on a table, showing the four drive bays and front ports

How to run game servers on a NAS

If you have a NAS and want to run game servers, then you’re in luck.

2 I don’t need Disney+ anymore

I migrated all my DVDs to storage years ago

Jellyfin web panel with movies, music, TV shows, and audiobooks

I have a large collection of movies and TV shows ripped from DVDs, going back to the mid 2000s when my dad first started showing me how to do it. As a result, I have years of backups of TV shows like The Simpsons and countless movies, too. While it was never really convenient to access those on my devices, out of convenience I picked up a Disney+ subscription. However, most of what I use Disney+ for is content I already own, so with my NAS, I can stream those files to all of my devices.

In this case, I use Jellyfin, and it works exactly like Netflix does. I can see my TV shows, I can see ratings, I can get subtitles, and I can download files for later playback from my NAS if I’m traveling. Plus, there’s no limit on how many devices I can stream from at once, so long as they can all be connected to the same network, either by being in the same location or with a VPN.

Admittedly, though, I still need to pay for Netflix. Don’t think I’ll have any physical media for most of the Netflix Originals I watch!

How to install Jellyfin on a NAS

Jellyfin seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. This is how to set it up on TrueNAS.

3 I don’t need a Google One subscription for Photo backups anymore

PhotoPrism gets the job done

Google Photos stopped offering unlimited photo backups years and years ago, so I purchased a Google One subscription to continue uploading my photos. When I built my NAS and set up Nextcloud and PhotoPrism, though, I was able to finally stop paying for that extended storage. It’s a minor saving given that 100GB of Google One storage is just two dollars a month, but it’s a saving nonetheless.

Even better, though, is that I’m keeping my data for me. I don’t need to worry about Google training any models on my photos, and I also don’t need to worry about someone gaining access to my Google account or my Google account being deleted. In other words, it’s all about control, and in the case of my photos, I can control all of them and where they end up.

How I built a Google Photos alternative on my NAS with PhotoPrism

If you have a NAS, combining PhotoPrism with Nextcloud can make for a great Google Photos alternative.

With these alone, I’m saving a lot of dollars monthly

With these three uses I get out of my NAS, I more than offset the cost of electricity to keep my NAS running monthly. With that, over time, I’ll also make back the money I lost by not selling the parts, and the money I lost by buying some HDDs. Plus, it’s all a learning experience, so not including the money saved, I also got a great experience out of it and learned some new things about networking.

I highly recommend any tech enthusiast build a NAS and get to grips with networking. It can be an incredibly enriching experience that teaches you a lot, can save you money, and can just be fun.