If your server is 100W that's 72kWh a month. If your electricity average is more than 7 cents an hour then it's cheaper to run a $5 server.

N100/N95 idling at <5W and ~20W on full load while also quite performant

While it's probably the case for a desktop PC, a new mac-mini has an idle power draw of < 5W.

~10W is what my socket reports for regular use on the M2 Pro.

They are not cheap anymore, unfortunately, but at least you get much more performance out of them than you would from some $5 VPS.

$5 servers don't include a GPU for Jellyfin transcoding

Good luck finding a $5 server with enough storage for a decent Linux ISO collection.

usbx gives you 1tb for that which is enough unlike you're an archivist

i think usbx means https://ultra.cc/