If I had 1-2TB of data and didn't need to transcode, ever, could maybe make sense to have a hosted service somewhere, maybe even a Digital Ocean $5/month droplet with Google Drive backed storage with rclone or something. Plex is a free steaming and hosting service with a premium paid tier.

I currently have a 3-server stack, running TrueNAS Scale with 170TB+ of storage and dual Proxmox servers running Plex and the rest of my media stack, plus additional VMs for other homelab purposes. Yes here's how to sign up for a free or paid account on the streaming and hosting platform. Plex Pass is 4.99 per month, 39.99 per year, or 149.99 for a lifetime subscription. Systems are built from pre-packaged nodesEach CPU is a Dedicated L5640 Core, each system comes with 1TB storage by defaultGigabit unmetered port with 200Mbps guaranteed included with every system. Something like s3 backed storage and an ec2 instance? Thousands - TBs of data a month ingress/egress, plus the initial upload of existing data. Plex Media Server (Local Media Hosting) Minimum System Requirements: An Intel Core 2 Duo that’s clocked at 2. That's just for the media stack, not even considering the rest of my homelab stuff. Looked into it, priced it out across various services and storage alone (including using Google Drive, in the most basic 'supported' method for unlimited storage - 5 enterprise accounts at $20/ea/month), not to mention sunk cost in hardware that I already own, it would take years before I would realistically see savings.

Plex cloud hosting