What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

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?"

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.

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!

Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.

Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)

…anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.

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

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.

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!

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.

Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting

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 needed a new saucepan.

I've now replaced half my kitchen.

Fountain pens - I started with a 30 euro Parker but it seems like just one is never enough.

Reading. Bear with me…you start by getting a cheap physical or digital copy of the book. Then you fall in love with the book/author. Then you have to buy all the books by that author…but not the cheap editions…the fancy editions! You need to display these babies! And oh! They sell cool collectors items that would be perfect for the book shelf! Rinse and repeat for so…so many books. Sigh.

3d printing. I started out with a cheapish Chinese model, got annoyed by the lack of accuracy and bought a Prusa.
Then there’s the filaments, accessories, post processing stuff... I own a Dremel now for some reason!
And I’m constantly eyeing those resin 3d printers, telling myself the higher resolution is totally worth it…
The only thing saving my bank account is my low attention span and dozens of other interests :)

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...

I have autism and ADHD, so all of them:

• Cycling
• Bicycle touring
• Skateboarding
• Vert Skateboarding
• Freestyle Skateboarding
• Retro Video Gaming
• Drawing
• Reading
• Programming and Raspberry Pi's

That's only my 30's which is the last 4 years. Hobbies for me are normally short and fierce obsessions when I start, they eventually slow down into a more 'normal' pasttime that I do sometimes to past the time.

Bicycling for me. Started off with a cheap old bike that I tried keeping in as goid condition as possible without spending too much on it. Problem with old bikes is wear and tear so things break and new old parts are hard to cheaply. So it became a hackjob. Then got me a new one and realised riding on roads only got boring so I started experimenting with gravel and singletrack.

Guess what? Time for a new bike. And a more expensive one. Carbon. And to maintain it I needed more tools. Also new tubes as the spare ones I had didn't fit that big of tyres. Also moved to a new place and now I got a MTB arena within a few km from home. So of course I had to get me one of those. And to maintain the suspension I needed new stuff, oils and tools.

Clothing. Bags. Events. It becomes a lot after a while.

Also planning for bike nr4, a steel fatbike. Promised myself not to buy anything this year, but the year is soon over...

Did I mention bikepacking? Yeah that is another big black hole of expenses. But a fair bit of overlap with backpacking so costs are split.

Motorcycle riding, done the right way.

Bought a decent street bike to start on, learn the ropes for several years, had the occasional mishhap or two which I fixed by myself. Still, cost money to fix things right?

Upgraded to a proper sport bike and realized how much fun it is, also with a new level of danger involved. Still, I wasn't an idiot into things right. Bought 100% proper gear, including a track suit, good helmet, gloves, etc. as any motorcyclist knows, you'll eventually drop your bike, which I did. Again, fixing it yourself is certainly an option, but also again, it cost money.

Then, I made the mistake of going to my first track day. They will allow you to use your own motorcycle as long as you prep it correctly and have decent tires and safety gear. This was an absolute game changer, and I was hooked harder than a heroin addict with an unlimited bank account. Unfortunately, I am neither of those two categories, and track days only get more expensive the deeper you get into them. First of all, they are not cheap to begin with. A decent track day will set you back 300 to $500 just to get on the track. Then, to really get the most out of it, you should have true racing tires with tire warmers. Then there's the matter of getting your bike to the track, race fuel, a place to hang out, etc etc etc. The list goes on and on.

Photography.

I started to really get into it back in 2015 with a Sony A6000 and a kit lens. Then you buy more, higher quality lenses. Then you buy better camera bodies with full frame sensor, then lenses that are full frame compatible. Then the various odds and end accessories. Then trips around the world to take pictures of things.

I have taken a break from photography recently, on account that having a kid doesn't allow me a lot of opportunity to edit my photos anymore. They say the best camera you have is the one that is on you. That has proven to be true while I try to be as present as possible around my daughter. I can quickly take out my phone, capture the moment and it will take care of most of the post processing edits that I can share with family later.

Tabletop RPG. I started in High school, you need only paper a pen and a set of dice, right ? All the rules can be found online anyway, right ?

But it's so much better to have the physical books. And you need more than one dice of each obviously. And this nice metal dice looks very good. I obviously need different set of dice with colors pattern that match my different characters.

Speaking of characters, I need mini. I could get the cheap basic one of course, but the lead ones looks sooo much better.

And I obviously need custom models for all my characters.

Several years later, with a disposable income and I added maps, tokens, terrains, cards, ect. Even a tablet that I use only for this. I'm now limited by the storage place available in my flat (maybe for my own good).

Watercolor.

Children play with $5 palettes. Apparently I pay $20 for a single color tube.

Farming - family has been doing it for ~5 generations. I'd say we have put in about $10 M dollars over time (adjusted for inflation).

What's that dear? It's a way of life/occupation . . . are you sure? Seems like it must be a hobby given the return we've made on it over the years. Well, if you're sure.

My wife said that farming is technically an occupation and not a hobby. I still have my doubts given how much we have thrown away on it over the years, but I don't like to disagree with her (she's usually right).

Playing music. Started on a shitty hand-me-down acoustic guitar. Got a better guitar. Got an electric. Got a better amp. Got a couple of pedals. Got a better amp. Got like 6 more amps, some cabs, 5 more guitars, a huge pedalboard, a cello, a keyboard, an audio interface, attenuators, mics, etc etc.

You gotta understand... I need all this stuff. There are subtle differences that you've never noticed before but will probably hear once I do an a/b comparison for you, and I absolutely must get an AC15 next to round out the collection instead of buckling down and recording something.

Mechanical pencils. You can go from $6 Kuru Toga Advances to $60 rOtring 800s to $100+ imported Japan region exclusive Kuru Toga Dives

Making pizzas.

3 months, $200 of equipment and expensive ingredients and a day's work per pizza later and I can confirm it is 100% worth it.

Cycling.

You can certainly do it on an 300€ bike, but who would want that if you can pay 300€ for the helmet alone.

Flight simming. Started out with a cheap joystick. Now I have an expensive one, throttle quadrants, rudder pedals, a vr headset and I've built myself a button box and a flight seat. And I'm now I want a helicopter collective. Oh well..

I am probably too late to this... But here goes.

Every damn time I get into something, I over do it.

I spent $13k on my kitchen stove, this one keeps giving, but that is $13,000.00 USD! Just for my kitchen stove. My range hood because it is required with my high output stove was $3k, and then let's talk makeup air to replace what is taken out by it.

Or what about woodworking? Yep, I wanted to do it, and still do. I have a half completed work bench, and some basic tools... That will be about $2k...

Let's buy a boat! Yep 29 years old, runs great... Break out another thousand...

But most recently, Plex... You know, let's get rid of subscriptions... Yeah, this year alone I have put $900 or so into that. Yep I sure saved money on canceling Netflix!

Houseplants.

It started with a little green in the living room and suddenly turned into a full grown, humid, highly poisonous indoor jungle that’s thirsty as fuck. And it turns out that exotic plants, fancy pots, growing lights, different types of soil for different species, fertilizers, and dozens of liters of water every day are somehow expensive…

Edit: yes, I love it

Mechanical keyboards. Picked up a keychron for cheap. Decided it was too loud, decided to change the switches. Then the keycaps. Now I'm ordering barebones keyboards and artisan custom keycaps. This shit is an addiction.

Selfhosting media

PLANTS, LOTS OF THEM

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.

Sex toys. My collection is worth more than my car.

Solving the Rubik's cube

You either get into speedcubing and get high end cubes to improve your performance, at least of the official categories and a couple must haves like the Mirror cube.

And / Or

You start collecting cubes and puzzles of all kinds and shapes (yes, even non-cubical :o). You start to acquire custom cubes built by hand by artesians or niche brands.

For the love of what's good in this world, stick to that one budget MJC set of competitive cubes until you are actually 10 or 20 seconds behind the world record

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.

Magic the Gathering..

Arduino and hobby electronics. It started out as a continuous loop pad dye machine to save me having to dye fabric by hand, strictly mechanical, but then I wanted to automate adding the chemicals at the right times. Then it was keeping the dye liquor a consistent temperature. Then it was draining the trough automatically. Then I figured out I could design my own PCBs and have them fabricated. It just keeps going...

House plants. Sure a few mass-market plants are dirt cheap, but soon you get into unusual plants, plants with special needs, hundreds/thousands of plants, grow lights, grow racks, terrariums, automated watering systems…

When I first got into VRChat to hang out with some friends, I thought maybe I could survive just playing on desktop for free. Now, a couple thousand dollars later, I own a Valve Index, extra base stations and 4 trackers for full-body tracking.

Woodworking. You start with a few tools to fix things in your house, and suddenly, you got vintage handtools worth thousands of euros and you seriously speak of installing your "shop".

Music production. You start with pirated FL Studio and sone freeware plugins and the next thing you know is you're planing your hone studio with room treatment, expensive monitors, an expensive interface, aonther evrn more expensive interface, that one vintage compressor you absolutely need, a tape machine, and then you want I synthesizer, just a small, versaitle one, and next thing you know is you're buying the second euro rack for your mod synth because there wasn't enough space in the first one, because you need that one filter, and since you got lots of free slots now, why not buy some more fx. Fx can't hurt, right? And maybe one oscillator, you always wanted a fifth one...

Magic the Gathering

Espresso.

It started with a second hand cheap machine from my grandmother as a gift for Christmas.

Then I bought a delonghi grinder for £50 and a used delonghi dedica for £60.

Then I upgraded the grinder to a baratza sette for £300.

Then I upgraded the espresso machine to a Lelit Bianca for £2000

Then I bought an EG-1 grinder for £3000

Now I'm looking to upgrade my machine soon.

Also I bought acaia scales and a puqpress and various coffee related things along the way, as well as spending essentially £10 a week on beans

Getting fed up strimming our 4 acre, very steep field.

I looked at remote control mowers. At the time they were all well over £6k, so I thought I'd try building one. Well, I've done it and it works well, but it's taken three years and cost over a grand so far in parts.

For me, it's board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I'm sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.

No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.

Data hoarding and self-hosting every service under the sun.

Traditional painting and illustration! While I now know that I never needed to spend more than $250 for professional-grade tools, I've spent about $18,000. As for sales in 3.5 years, they don't account for more than $800. For that I mostly blame Instagram where it's not possible to grow anymore organically and get an audience & potential customers. So I moved to the federated open source PixelFed now, if anyone's interested in my book-style illustration: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli

Also, as a word of advice for anyone who wants to also do illustration and don't want to do the same mistakes that I did. All you need is:

• The Lukas 24 watercolor palette of student grade ($18). It's good enough and these days most paintings are scanned, so even if not all colors are lightfast, it's not a big deal. Few people only buy originals, most go for prints. If you're going to go selling originals, consider the Daniel Smith primaries set of 6 colors for $40.
• A set of brushes of different sizes, including a flat brush and round brushes including a long thin one to do details, $15
• Pencil, eraser, sharpener, $15
• A set of gouache. Best bang for the buck for professional quality is DaVinci brand ($10 per large tube), or if you want to go cheap, the Himi Miya set for $25. If you go for the cheaper stuff, it's still advised to get a better quality white tube, so it's truly opaque (the cheap stuff aren't opaque enough). So go for Holbein or DaVinci white for $10-$15.
• Soft core colored pencils, set of 48+. $15 (you will mostly need the muted colors to enhance the painting with harder edges)
• Grey, sepia, black ink pens, and manga ink brush pens (for some types of paintings only), $40
• 100% cotton paper for watercolor $25, or any watercolor paper for gouache $10 (gouache works on any, watercolor is more nuanced).
• Brush watercolor markers, e.g. Tombows or Ecoline -- in case you want to do such type of illustration too, $30 for a few muted colors.
• Masking fluid for watercolors, $10
• White gel pen and white Posca pen (0.7mm) for white highlights, $15
• Faber Castell white pencil soft pastel, $4
• Caran d'ache Luminance white colored pencil, $4 (the cheaper colored pencils above again don't include a strong white)
• Caran d'ache Neocolor II white crayon, $4
• A ruler, to help you sketch.

I included various mediums above in white color because highlights are king in illustration, and each provides a different look and feel, depending on the painting. Happy painting!

Playing racing games on PC.

At first, it's just a few racing games with an Xbox controller.

Then it get more complicated with the more advanced racing sim/arcade and the controller isn't enough anymore.

Then come a simple wheel and pedals set.

But now the games is way more enjoyable, then up the difficulty.

Now I need gear shifter, hand brake, better monitor, better PC.

Then not long until I need a full racing cockpit to mount everything on.

And now, after all that is just the beginning.

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.

Homelab (running home servers). Especially since I'm in Canada so I pay out the ass for shipping. Got into it purely out of interest for server administration, programming (computer science in general really) and the desire to experiment on my own hardware, but I'll have you know I have a total of 48 processing cores and 30 TB of storage running my personal fileserver and "private cloud!" Though not relying on the likes of Google for data storage and "cloud" services is a massive genuine benefit!

I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially "donating" it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I'm consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.

Reloading.

I thought, I can buy a Hornady press, use range brass, and same some cash!

And, well, kind of. But mostly no. Yes, buying primers, bullets, and powder, and using range brass is indeed cheaper than buying boxes or cases of ammunition on a per bullet basis. Sure, a set of dies can get expensive ($200+ for match-grade dies if you do, e.g. long range shooting competitions). Oh, and you need to clean your brass, preferably in a wet tumbler, and then dry your brass, and also get a trim station to trim to length, and possibly a primer pocket swager if you've picked up military brass with crimped primer pockets... And a scale, you gotta have a good scale so that you know exactly how much powder you're using (seriously; you need a good scale, you cannot skip this), and you need a chronography to measure speeds to develop the most accurate loads...

...And then you start getting into progressive reloading presses that are intended for really high volume shooting that start at around $2000, and top out at around $10k, plus things like annealing stations so that your neck tension is always consistent after you've crimped the case, and powder tricklers for when volumetric powder dispensers aren't accurate enough...

But the real expense hits when you're shooting 10x as much because now ammunition is "cheap".

BRB, gonna spend $400 on 8# of Varget powder and $300 on 1000 Hornady ELD-M .224 bullets.

Literally any hobby I have seriously messed with.

Although- racecars was never cheap.

My homelab started off pretty cheap. But, at this point, I am quite certain I have a few thousand bucks worth of hardware. Shit- I have two thousand bucks in just HDDs, SSDs/NVMes...

3D modelling. It's impossible to get into 3D modelling and not get eventually sucked into 3D Printing... Which as other people have explained on the thread, is it's own money sinker.

3d printing.

Started out with a cheap printer, mostly to supply my friends with miniatures and terrain. They loved the stuff I printed for them, so gave me money for my effort, which went into upgrading my printer and buying more supplies and buying a new printer so I could print better, bigger things for them.

Then, so enamored by what 3d printing could do, they bought their own 3d printers.

and now no one talks to me cause I no longer have any use and i'm stuck with a printer I havent even removed from the box and assembled for 3 years, and another printer that only stays around because every 2-3 months something comes up where I can design and print a part to fix something around the house.

D&D. When I got back into it as an adult it was mostly because I could get into it for $0. I was dead broke at the time. I pirated the books downloaded the free basic rules 😉 on my trash find laptop and was good to go.

But man once I had money it turns out I really like collecting books and the D&D ones are not cheap. I do not want to think about how much I've spent.

Smoking cigars was a huge money suck, back when I used to smoke.

Other than that and video games, it's got to be art and writing supplies. Probably over $1000 if I add it all up over the years.

Which actually isn't that bad considering how much I enjoy writing and drawing, so I guess that's something to be happy about

Making electronic music. You can get lots of software tools for free, so I started out with those.

Then I realized how many details get lost, depending on what speaker/headphones you use, so bought myself higher quality headphones. As in, quite high-end for normies, but obviously, I'm at the lower end for music production hardware.

Now I'm considering buying a MIDI keyboard, because those software tools don't quite emulate proper piano playing. Although, you could obviously also spend money on getting different software tools. And of course, on a quadrillion plugins for these software tools, to produce different sounds.

I'm just glad that my other hobby is programming, so when my music-self gets excited about an idea, my programming-self will want to solve it.
...and then never finish what music-self wanted, but at least we're distracted from spending money.

I’m not sure it can get worse than bird watching. Completely free to start. Then you are like “man I wish I could see that bird over there” so you buy some binoculars. Then you think “dang this bird is moving too fast I still can’t identify it, maybe I should try photographing it”. Two months later you’ve spent 10k because bird photography is apparently the most intense kind of photography. Turns out photographing very tiny things that move very fast from very far away is very difficult and the lenses you need start at thousands of dollars and go up to tens of thousands of dollars. That isn’t including the camera body, which you probably want very fast autofocus on, along with bird eye tracking, which hardly comes on any cameras at all.

Yeah…

Tinkering with electronics. Like, breadboards, integrated circuits, transistors, microcontrollers.

I've got a tacklebox full to bursting with components and parts worth probably close to a grand.

My humble used office desktop turned NAS quickly became a dual-processor, 64GB ECC machine with more storage and processing power than I'll probably ever need.

Pc gaming. I started off with a refurbished HP omen, but now I'm wanting something more. I'm aiming for a custom built and that has led me to the discovery of companies like Digital Storm, System 76, and Falcon Northwest.

Torrenting and data hoarding are also hobbies of mine. Every so often I'll buy an external hard drive once I max out the storage on a current one. One hard drive failed a while back and now I'm looking for data recovery companies, but their services are a bit pricey.

Knitting. Only handdyed yarns, which are costly. And of course you need ALL colours. And only the most luscious fibres and yarns.

I've resorted to dyeing yarn myself - which opened up another deep, deep rabbit hole.

And a business.

Amongst all my hobbies (am kind of a serial hobbyist…) I think fishing is the one that turns out the most expensive compared to my initial assumption.

Started with trout fishing into fly fishing the lure then carp… daaamn now I’m looking into a bassboat or a kayak…

I think audio, headphones, amps, all this stuff. Microphones, recorders, physical mixing gear. If I would go in that direction, I would need a seperate room and loots of money

Started out with a raspberry pi several years ago. Got my feet wet with entry level, beginner friendly NAS prebuilds. Hunted for recycled computer parts. Now searching for and actively acquiring enterprise gear that is making a massive dent in my wallet.

Music production. Started with a old pc and a pirated version of ableton. Now I bought my first top tier laptop and a license of ableton… and oh whats that around the corner? Is that a modular synth?

Probably gardening.

A few seed packets and some dirt turns into building nice cedar raised gardens, filling them all with great quality soil, expensive liquid fertilizers, various irrigation systems, and so on. And I can't just haul all that dirt in my sedan... But hey, I have 20+ tomato plants, and about as many different pepper plants every year.

It's honestly nowheer near as expensive as some of my other hobbies, but on the "a lot more money than I expected" scale it's up there.

Vinyl records... 25 years ago you could hardly buy them . I listen to punk and they never gave up on the format and so it was cheap and collectible because print runs were small.. from 2010 onwards, they came back in fashion and the major labels started clogging up the pressing plants and then pre-orders became a thing and the price started creeping up...now, in my country a vinyl that used to be $20 is now pushing $55 and mainstream artists are pushing $70 ...my desire has really waned.. I'm priced out of finding new artists because I can't buy everything all the time like I used to.

I started music when I was like 7/8, my parents encouraged me to do so. And here we are, 20 years later, my dad told me cocaine would’ve probably been way cheaper.

Old Thinkpad refurbishing. Can't wait till Windows 10 meets its EOL so I can finally get some more X60s

Film photography. Started with a camera I got for free, and $20 worth of film. Quickly spiraled into many cameras that I bought or inherited, and so much money on film and development

Flight-simming. I started with a cheap joystick. Now my desk is littered with touch-screens, custom controllers etc.

It’s a toss up between cooking and home networking for me.

Cooking because it started off as just finding neat recipes and giving them a shot to now experimenting with new techniques and harder to procure ingredients. My pantry looks like a mini spice market and keeping them fresh is its own hassle. Plus needing all the gear gets expensive!

I also got really into home networking during the start of the pandemic. I went from having a simple off the shelf mesh network to a full network rack in my basement serving some high end access points and cat6 drops in every room. Now I have a pretty secure iot stack that’s separate from my main vlan and one devoted to my work computer.

Running. Not as expensive as a lot of the things posted about here, but my shoes cost ~$150 and I have replaced them a couple times a year. I'm planning to get in to trail running soon (as opposed to running circles in my neighborhood, so now I want to add a running vest and a GPS watch, which is not cheap.

Considering that in theory all you need to run is your body and an open space, I feel like I have spent a lot of money.

EDIT: I forgot the ~$140 bone conducting headphones I bought! I for sure feel safer with them than my old headphones though, since I have been doing almost all of my running till now on the road.

Gaming. It used to be an MMO for like $15 a month. Now it's a new game for $70, the game has DLC for $20-$30 or skins or some battle pass.

No other ham radio nerds here besides me? It always starts with a $35 Baofeng hand-held...

Arma 3. I updated my router, computer and bought the dlcs so I could run a server.

I had a recipe blog prior to the pandemic. I put well over five grand into it over four years and didn't make a cent.
If I hadn't decided that I hate website with ads and third party cookies on them I probably could have made a few bucks during the pandemic.

Probs low hanging fruit for this thread, but vinyl collecting.

Started around 2011 by going to charity shops and second hand stores to find bargains. I used to be able to spend £10 a week and get 3/4 new (to me) records. Some were great ,some were trash, but that was the fun!

Then I started getting specific records, building towards band discographies... next thing I know, I'm dropping £25 per record for two bootleg records that were definitely not worth the price. Was a watershed moment and one that made me take a step back.

Ticked over for a year or two, next thing I know vinyl records are now in Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury's. Every new release comes on vinyl, and they're now £25+. Charity shops are now just full of junk vinyl, and all the second hand stores now charge £25+ because their pressings are "original"... all the fun is now gone.

Have you tried playing table tennis? It starts tame, but as soon as you get a bit competitive and learn about custom rackets...

I just drained my bank account last weekend for a new racket and box, a few new balls,...

I've had amazing luck with hobbys that should be expensive, but weren't.

Me & some friends have a small computer museum. We collect minicomputers & workstations. (Stuff used in science & academia.) We have computers dating back to the early 60s. But we started in the mid 90s, when NO ONE was interested. So we got everything for free. (Well... for the cost of renting large trucks.)

I'm a photographer. My DSLR is old, from just when DSLR's were getting "good enough" at a reasonable price. I bought it used when it was already "obsolete". And then someone gave me an exotic industrial camera they had at work which was "broken". It was too broken for industrial use, but works fine for studio use. I had to build some hardware & write all the software to use it, but... the results are fantastic. It blows away my DSLR. (But uses the same lenses!)

My library has probably cost a lot, but that's spread out over 40 years, so I don't notice it. (Also, I worked in a used bookstore for a bit, and that's a good way to get a lot of books CHEEEEEEEAP. Employee discount? Yes. Discount on books in the back that are slightly damaged and unsellable? YES.) And I've occasionally sold a rare book, so that offsets things.

Etc.

(Note: my home computer collection spans ten full-height racks. A few of those are on loan from the museum, but most are mine. Spent close to nothing on that. Somehow.)

Oh boy, where do I even start. I guess we should first have a minute of silence for my wallet...

• Fixing old computers

  In high school, I agreed to take the decommisioned PCs home. They were in various states of not working, I diagnosed the problems, bought parts, upgraded and fixed them all. I now had a ton of relatively old but reliable computers. What's the logical next step?

• Home server room (homelab).

  I live in a flat with a giant basement, so it's full of these old PCs and servers. I needed a server rack, switches, cabling, the whole nine yards.

• Photography

  New lenses and filters constantly bought. Sometimes a new camera body. This is my most expensive hobby by far, but I take care of the lenses so they at least hold value, unlike the PCs :)

Lego , need I say more?

Amateur Radio, Data Hoarding, Pc Gaming, and my car.

Homebrewing. If you want to brew something like IPA the cost of hops gets way higher.

Getting back into PC gaming after buying my friends old 300 euro gaming PC. I'm looking to upgrade and every little bit faster is only a little bit extra, so a 100 euro upgrade turned to a 120 euro upgrade, then a 150 euro upgrade to... i don't want to say how much i spent...

Dog training/sports.

Here I am thinking "I need to get more active and it'll be fun to do stuff with my best bud Link" (Link is a 4 year old golden retriever)

Starts with basic training obedience classes, no biggy. Then they offer Rally classes, which is basically obedience plus some fun stuff, cool, I'll take that class. Oh, I can get a cool title for him? Sure, we already trained him, why not! Ok he needs 3 successful runs, and each run attempt is $25...? k...

Rally Novice acquired...fun but... Was that really worth 150 for the class + $75 for the three runs? ...sure whatever

Ooooo agility sounds fun! Let's do that! $150 for a 6 week session, that's not bad! 6 months and many sessions later + buying practice equipment... I'm officially poor. My dog is a happy boy, and I'm more active, but FML this is a rabbit hole lol

We're having a lot of fun, and my dog is a happier more obedient boy, but man was I not expecting the crazy expense. Those people with the dogs that have a bazillion titles and letters after their names? They've spent a literal fortune on that dog. It's absolutely mind boggling.

Tabletop Roleplaying Games.
I bought Mutant Year Zero in 2015 thinking "Ah, this will give me countless hours of play! I can make my own adventures and stuff!"
Now, my shelf is buckling after trying a hundred different games and supplements, and getting addicted to pretty books.
Currently, my favorite game of all time is Delta Green. Investigative horror mystery. Amazingly horrific scenarios (adventures) with True Detective season one level of masterful writing.

Check out Glass Cannon Podcast playing it on Spotify if you want!

I make a cross between dioramas and video games. It started out as a test to see if I could make something and now I am all in. It's all I want to work on. I have spent so much money on old lcd screens

Any art medium that requires canvases. A small one at WalMart is no problem, but as you move to larger works and need better canvas material it gets expensive fast.

Oh! And Arduino programming. A simple kit to get going isn't too bad. Then you're trolling Adafruit for parts, then you go big and start importing from China directly. Now you're building a garage addition for the electronics lab... Or is that just me? At least it's also able house my first motorcycle... First...

Homebrewing. I have made many a beer over 8 or 9 years. They get better with each batch, but along with it is another new piece of equipment to make the process easier or more efficient.

Music production. And IT in general.

But specifically the music production; started off as "I'll by FL Studio and muck around with it" to "I need ALL THE VSTs!". I've sunk like $2500 into it in the last two months (which is a hell of a lot of money to me), and I keep buying shit for it.

Am I any good at it? Fuck no. But it's not stopping me from keeping at it and buying shit I probably don't need :P

And the IT stuff consists of rack-mount servers and Pi's. I've sunk around $25k into it all over the last 12 years.

Audio equipment. Started as someone who collected a bunch of budget king IEMs and have been slowly creeping my way up in cost ;-;

Magnet fishing.

I bought a kit that included a reasonably sized 360° magnet, rope, grappling hook and protective cover for about £120 thinking that it would be good enough to keep me satisfied for a while.

After my first trip out and having to carry a load of scrap metal about a mile back to the car, I bought a cart for £80 so I could cart it all back instead. After having to use my car to pull my magnet out of the harbour on Saturday I've bought a cheap winch and a tow rope to anchor it to things for £25 for when it gets stuck somewhere I can't use my car.

And of course I wanted a bigger magnet almost immediately, but I've managed to hold off on that so far. Saying that it's fairly likely I will get an upgrade from Bondi magnets when the site launches as long as the price is competitive with Magnetar (I suspect it's a partnership and the magnets will be identical, but we'll see)

My wife and I started playing Disc Golf as an "inexpensive" and more accessible option to traditional golf with a started set of cheap discs off Amazon. Carts bags, and DOZENS of discs later...$$$

Art.

Gave up on buying and maintaining copics and just bought CSP. May have to switch to Krita at some point, but digital art is far more accessible than other mediums. Want a marker texture? The brushes for that are free, only real barrier is a graphics tabler.

Cycling. I started with a bike that was given to me by my uncle. Now I have a road bike, full equipment x3, a direct drive trainer for the rainy days and a subscription to use that.

1. Videogames. It has not been super expensive as I enjoy indie games the most, but still.

2. Pen and paper organization. This is recent. Due to a couple of mental disorders, I have problems remembering things and keeping organized. I was using a to-do list for my phone, but it was becoming less and less effective with time.

So I found a weekly planner online and I bought it telling myself that it was expensive, but it would be enough for a year and I wouldn't need anything else.

The planner has been great, by the way. Yet, when it arrived, I liked it so much that I had this classic feeling of not wanting to ruin it with my handwriting. I needed a good mechanical pencil! Erasable, yet stylized.

Then I thought the pages looked clean, but monotone. Stickers! What about my own creations? Thermal printer with sticker rolls! And so on and so on.

I am productive ...and addicted to stationery items.

I bought a vinyl copy of Beggars' Banquet by the Rolling Stones for 50p despite not having a record player. Fast forward six years and I now have a full stereo system, a collection worth over £10k and regularly order limited edition albums from small bands costing me large amounts each time. Send help.

I started getting invested in a TCG (Digimon) for the first time ever a couple months ago (magic, YGO, pokemon etc. never did it for me before).

One of the selling points (at least currently) is that most decks are fairly affordable (less than 50 bucks affordable) and viable and even the very competitive decks shouldn't set you back much (with less than 100 bucks you can easily make a top tier tournament-viable deck) .

Problem is I really started digging lots of different decks and discovering new favorite digimon and how they play and now I'm several hundreds of dollars of investment in both in cards and accessories (not even counting merch...).

I regret nothing though. It has helped me get out of the house (I work remote) and interact with people which has been very good for my mental health, and it gave me a way to revive some of my childhood nostalgia.

Only because no one has said it yet, headphones. You can get a really great set of headphones for $200 or so, but if you want it to sound a little better you're looking at $500-$700. But music can sound a bit better if you get better equipment for around $1200. Then you hear a $2000 set-up, and you chase that, until you hear a $5000 kit. And it just keeps going.

Coffee.

I started with cheap pre group coffee from the supermarket for less than £3 a bag and a chemex I picked up for £20. I now have four grinders, a bunch of pour over gear and an espresso machine (marax), worth several thousand. Plus a £80 a month fresh coffee bean habit.

I got into theater lighting in high school & college. Years after graduating and getting a “real” job I discovered a bunch of all volunteer community theaters in the towns around me. I started doing lighting design, and over time amassed a bunch of my own gear. I’ve also gotten a bit of a name for figuring out special effects. In my basement I have a dozen professional LED stage lights, strobe lights, a fog machine & hazer, and a bunch of bins of odds & ends used for various effects.

I like to repair and restore broken vintage audio gear.

"Wow, this 60's Sansui amp and those 70's AR speakers are practically free! I already have all the tools I need to repair them, it'll be fun and cheap. When I get these restored, I won't need anything else ever again!"

How little did I know.

I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you've got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you've got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least -- or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.

I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you're the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.

Ketamine

Was violist (played the viola) for years. It's similar to a violin just a bit bigger and deeper. Have a true love for it... But it's expensive to maintain after a while because it's good to keep up private lessons, the maintenance of the instrument, and then having to buy sheet music/music books for only playing one song, one passage.. I miss it.. not the most expensive hobby, but got that way for me cause I am a mom of four and married.. SOOOO yeah

Hiking.

Not sure if you’d call it a hobby or more of a collection but I collect mechanical wrist watches and that can get expensive fast.

I started with a mechanical under $100, with a decent movement and a display back case so I could see the gears and rotor inside, and that could’ve been it. But once you get the bug, you want to get different types of movements, different case sizes, maybe some complications, sooner or later you’re going to start wanting some hand finishing, and then it gets really expensive. I wanna get into mechanical watch repair too but that gets really expensive and takes a lot of skill and time so I’m going to hold off a few years I think. Plus once I go there, there’s no coming back. I’ll be buying broken stuff on eBay constantly and there goes all my paycheques

Used to homebrew. At first I thought it'd be cheaper than buying my own beer but it quickly ratcheted-up with grain mills, larger and larger pots and burners, finding places to store the fermenting/aging beer, finding time to brew, finding time to bottle/keg, the clean-up and mess...and, in certain cases, you go through the whole process to find an entire batch has been ruined.

Food...I like cuisine. Requires eating out. I find a place, don't care about the cost. Try something I've never had. It can get expensive.

Cross stitching.

I must have $700 worth of floss a 200$ custom stand and then accessories, I just gave away 82 skeins of off brand that advertised dmc dye standards, but WEREN'T. Don't buy floss from Amazon kids, it's worth it to do a custom order from joanns or Michael's mid project.

It started with wanting to do a fun little Christmas ornament project with the Littles and now I have 7 mid finished projects including a massive LOTR project I've restated 3 times, that has 1 of 12 8×11 pages done on this beast l nearly 3'x2' Aida cloth.

knitting/crochet. Yarn is expensive as hell.

Bumping uglies with my SO. We now have multiple children.

Fish tank.

RC stuff, but only kinda? My dad got me into micro helicopters about a decade ago. I now have several dozen planes, drones, helis, etc. Not to mention multiple RC radios, batteries, chargers, and FPV goggles. Absolutely love it, though. To be fair, it's been a few thousand dollars over a decade. It ads up sure... but quite a bit less than I spend on video games, and more satisfying. :)

keyboards, F-ing keyboards

Simple, I read. And with the internet I never have to worry about buying books.

None of my hobbies are inexpensive (bikes, guitars and parenting)

Every time a friend tries to get me to take up snowboarding or some other gear based hobby I'm like, "are you fucking insane?"

I started knitting for my kids when we were living in colorado.

so I ended up processing wool from raw fleece -> hat

raw merino fleece, raw alpaca fleece, Scouring soap, dye, dyeing classes with natalie redding, spinning wheel, drum carder, hackle, table loom, warping thing for yarn

Math

ended up going to school for math education (with pell grant $500 per 6 month term) I can't pass the exit exam. tried 5 times out of those I had to pay out of pocket for 4 of them $480.

and surprise, I got dxed with ADHD. That's why I couldn't pass the tests. now I pay $50 a month for it (doc + meds)

Firearms.

It was fairly inexpensive before the pandemic. But since it's been a nightmare of price gouging.

It's also one of those hobbies where buying one thing leads down a rabbit hole of spending.

Hobby electronics started cheep, with a crappy soldering iron (a good precision one was the best purchase ever) and some cheep parts, ended up with a room stuffed with a thousand dollars worth or parts and a few thousand more in test equipment.

Every. Single. One.

Hiking. You start out with what you got. Then on the first few hikes you find out what gear you absolute have to bring with you. Then when you have a fine little gear stash, you begin adding things from the never ending “nice to have” list. Then you go to outdoor stores just to have a look around… HA!

ITT: Everybody's current/longest hobby.

Mine is boardgames. You start free by playing somebody else's collection, then you get the urge to start your own...

Fishing. Who would have thought it was so easy to get addicted to buying various baits and lures.

Disc golf.

Discs cost only $15-20 new, used ones can be only a few bucks, you only need one or a few to play, and most courses are free.

In reality, you keep buying new discs. And a bag to carry them. And more discs. And a bigger bag. Then a home basket. And a net to practice in. And more discs. Then a rack to hold the extra discs you can’t bag…. It adds up!

Thinkpads.

Great post OP!