You know what, I’m surprised it took this long

Once you’ve got a job in your chosen career, 99% of situations don’t give any shit about what happened before that.

I think there’s an alpine build too if your system has low oxygen levels

In the magpie nests

(Sorry, you made me think of this article)

We’re so far gone that saying “satire is dead” is kinda dead in itself

For a good while, Plex was the only game in town that did the job well, and they put the transcoding feature behind the paywall.

Given it wasn’t that expensive for a lifetime pass a number of years ago (I remember it was cheaper than a game anyway) and they still seemed relatively user-centric at the time, many people like me felt like they were supporting developers building something that was useful to us.

I still run my Plex server since it’s not really costing me not to, but I’ve been running Jellyfin too for a little while and it more or less can do the same job these days

Well that’s why I prefaced what I said with the point about not having enough detail for specifics. I went off a rough idea of what any typical smart home gadget I’ve come across would require.

Many consumers care about ongoing maintenance of the stuff they buy, especially smart home stuff. I know I personally wouldn’t touch a new product if I got any impression it would stop working or be abandoned in the future.

Apps sometimes break in some way with new OS versions and need changes to continue working correctly. New devices come out and the app might operate on assumptions that are no longer true, requiring improvements.

Security researchers might find a bug in your app/API/gadget and now suddenly you’re hosting a botnet whilst potentially being on the hook legally and financially. That’s gonna need engineer time to diagnose and fix, ideally proactively.

And yes you’re right, one engineer could do it all, I addressed that in my original comment. If one engineer can do it all well they are going to be expensive, the implication being you could get it done badly for cheap. If OP’s idea is just a scam product then sure, but I’m assuming they actually want whatever their idea is to be successful and not give off a half-arsed vibe to potential customers.

Given we don’t know what your idea is it’s kinda hard to speak in specifics, but just on the software side you’re probably looking at three engineers minimum—app engineer (probably x2, one iOS one android), api/infra engineer & an embedded software guy for the device itself. At least the first two will need to be permanent as those things will need to be maintained over time. Any engineer that says they can do all three roles to a high standard is either lying or going to be very expensive.

Then you may start to need someone handling project management around those guys to make sure things stay on track and that’s before we get into the hardware side of things.

Depending where you are, an engineering team like that could easily get quite expensive quickly and some of these will be ongoing costs. So I guess I’m saying make sure you know what all of your costs are going to be and that your finances cover it comfortably before you commit to anything

[16-bar eurodance loops intensify]

Plex is probably the easiest and most convenient, I think jellyfin is viable too, but I don’t use it.

If you’ve got the money, Roon or Audirvana are the gold standard of self hosted music

If you want something similar, but free, look into things like volumio or subsonic based solutions.