Frugal

If you want to go way back, books were a huge investment. Before the printing press, each one was hand copied, which took countless hours for each one. Like, one book could be comparable in to the cost of a house.

UNIX

AT&T, IBM, and a few others used to charge tens of thousands of dollars for it but Berkeley and Linus Torvalds both created kernels that didn’t use any of their code and pushed UNIX into a very niche market while open source UNIX derivatives took over the market. This is vastly over simplified but UNIX now has open source derivatives that anyone can use, modify, or distribute.

Typically things they can they can tack subscription fees onto

TVs are very cheap now. The 40" Samsung LCD in my basement cost $1,200 fifteen years ago. It will soon be replaced by a 43" Samsung 4K TV that costs under $300.

DVD players used to cost $500+ and are now practically free.

I pay $15/month for xbox game pass and have access to hundreds of games. I don't own them but I can if I want to.

International phone calls. Actually long distance domestic phone calls too.

FYI the cheaper LEDs and usb power outlets are all disposable quality. Prices on the high quality stuff are coming down because of the downward force of cheap shit, but the really cheap shit is cheap because it's shit.

I always used to figure a decent desktop computer would cost me between $2k and $3k. That's going back to the early 90s. But even though the value of a dollar has plummeted since then, you can get a decent desktop for significantly less, maybe half.