I cancelled Netflix.
Here's what I built instead.

I did the calculation one evening and it genuinely annoyed me. Not because the individual numbers were shocking — R229 for Netflix, R59 for Prime, R179 for Disney — but because of what those numbers added up to when I looked at them honestly.

According to a US survey, consumers spent an average of $3,350 per year on streaming in 2025 — $278.50 per month — to stay connected to their chosen services. That is before you factor in the South African rand equivalent at current exchange rates. In South Africa in 2026, Netflix charges R229 per month for a plan that gives you 4K on multiple screens. Amazon Prime is R59 per month. Disney+ is R179 per month after the introductory period. Add Showmax at R39 if you want local content. That is R506 per month — R6,072 per year — before you even get to Apple TV or any of the premium sports add-ons.

And what do you actually watch? For most people the honest answer is: a few series that you finish in a week, followed by months of scrolling through a catalogue of things you have no interest in. The content you actually want to watch is spread across four platforms simultaneously. The show everyone is talking about this week is on the one you do not have. The moment you subscribe, everyone moves on to something else that is exclusive to a different platform.

Subscribing to all eight major streaming services costs approximately $85–120 per month for ad-free plans. That is the cable bill that streaming was supposed to kill. It did not kill the bill. It just replaced one monopoly with eight competing ones.

The experience that broke me specifically

I am not someone who watches a lot of television. When I want to watch something, I generally know what it is. I do not want to browse. I want to watch the specific thing, at the time I choose to watch it, without an advertisement appearing in the middle of a scene I have been waiting three episodes to reach.

The streaming model is not built for that. It is built on the assumption that you will scroll, discover, and end up watching something you did not plan to watch. The recommendation algorithm is not trying to find you the specific thing you want. It is trying to maximise the amount of time you spend on the platform. Those are different goals with different outcomes.

I was paying for three platforms. The content I wanted to watch that month was split across all three, plus one service I did not have. The content that was actually available on the platforms I paid for — that I had any genuine interest in watching — amounted to maybe six hours. Six hours of content I wanted. Thousands of rands per year. The maths does not work.

So I started looking for another way.

What I found — and what I built

The developer community has been building alternatives to the streaming platform model for years. Not piracy tools — that is a different conversation with a different ethical picture. But open source media management and streaming platforms that let you organise, access, and stream content you have legitimately obtained, through a personal interface that you control, on infrastructure that you own.

I found a repository with a free API key. I hooked it up to Firebase and GCP. I disconnected the sign-up flow — this is strictly personal, one user, one account, zero redistribution. The result is a personal streaming platform that runs on Google Cloud infrastructure at essentially zero cost at personal-use scale.

The content I watch is content I have access to through legitimate means. I am not selling it. I am not sharing it publicly. I am not building a business on someone else's intellectual property. I am watching things I want to watch, when I want to watch them, on an interface I built myself, without paying R500 per month for the privilege of being shown things I do not want.

The streaming price table — what you are actually paying

Amazon Prime at R59 per month is genuinely the best value in South African streaming in 2026 — 4K streaming with 3 concurrent screens, plus Amazon shopping benefits. Netflix charges R229 per month for those same specs. That is not a small gap, that is a chasm. If you are going to keep any subscription, Prime is the defensible one.

But even Prime, the cheapest and most rational of the major platforms, is R708 per year for content you may or may not watch. That is the problem. Not the price per platform. The aggregate.

The case for open source and community

There is a thriving open source ecosystem built around personal media management, self-hosted streaming, and community-maintained software that does everything the commercial platforms do — without the subscription model, without the algorithm trying to maximise your screen time, and without the content being locked behind whichever platform paid the most to licence it this month.

This ecosystem is not piracy. It is the difference between the community that maintains open source software and the corporation that sells proprietary software. The tools are legitimate. The community is genuine. The people building and maintaining these projects are doing it because they believe in open infrastructure, personal control over technology, and the principle that software should serve the people who use it — not the platform that hosts it.

The practical application — building a personal streaming setup on GCP, Firebase, or any other cloud infrastructure — is a weekend project for someone with basic developer skills. It requires: a free API key from a community project, a Firebase project on the Spark free tier, and an afternoon of configuration. The result is a personal media platform that you own, control, and pay almost nothing to run.

The ethical line — where it is and why it matters

The open source streaming community has a clear ethical line and it is worth stating it plainly: personal use is different from distribution.

Building a personal media platform for your own use, accessing content you have legitimately obtained, running it on your own infrastructure with no public access — this sits in a different ethical category from operating a commercial piracy service, redistributing content you do not own, or building a business on someone else's creative work without compensation.

The creative people who make the content that these platforms licence — the writers, directors, actors, crew, animators, composers — deserve to be paid for their work. The mechanism that currently pays them is imperfect and skewed heavily toward the platforms rather than the creators, but that is a problem with the platform model, not a justification for bypassing compensation entirely.

The ethical position is this: support creators directly where you can. Buy the thing when there is a good way to buy it. Use the open source tools for personal viewing of content you have legitimate access to. Do not sell what does not belong to you. Do not build a commercial service on someone else's creative labour without their consent and compensation.

That line is clear. The community that builds these open source tools generally understands it and states it clearly in their documentation. The people who cross it are not part of that community — they are using the tools for a different purpose than they were built for.

What this is really about

This article is not really about streaming. It is about the broader principle of owning your own technology stack rather than renting access to someone else's.

The streaming model is one version of a pattern that appears across almost every category of software: subscription access to a platform you do not own, whose pricing you cannot control, whose continuation depends on decisions made by a board in another country, and which can change its terms, raise its prices, or remove content you depend on at any time without consulting you.

The alternative is building. Building takes time and skill. It requires understanding the technology at a level deeper than clicking "subscribe." But what it produces is infrastructure you own, that runs at cost rather than at margin, that does exactly what you need it to do because you built it for that purpose.

The open source community makes that possible. The cloud infrastructure to run it is more accessible and more affordable than it has ever been. The skills to build it are learnable by anyone willing to spend the time.

I cancelled Netflix. I built something instead. I pay almost nothing to run it. I watch exactly what I want to watch. And I own the whole thing.

That is what owning your stack looks like in practice. It applies to streaming. It applies to your website. It applies to your CRM, your analytics, your business tools. The principle is the same everywhere: build once, own it, pay cost rather than margin, and never have a platform make decisions for you that you should be making for yourself.