Ask Lemmy

Playing music has basically no skill ceiling.

I am still amazed about how much money you can spend on making coffee at home. 300€ for a manual grinder - "that's the cheao chinese stuff" wtf

Magic: the gathering.

There's several different styles of play known as "formats".

The Cheapest being "Standard". Which is the latest 3-5 sets released. The deck of 75 card deck can cost upwards of £500.

Then the most popular format, modern, which is the last 20ish years of release. The average deck there can be upwards of £1,500.

Then there's legacy and vintage where decks are in the high 4 figures and some even in the 5 figures.

Probably more well known but with the whole 'live edge' fad from a couple years ago now, some people don't realize you can spend upwards of 20-30k on a single piece of some types of raw lumber.

Gymnastics. The skill part is obvious but monetarily its more than i expected. I thought it would be like going to a regular gym but its usually much more expensive to use the gyms and thats if you can find a time slot where adult males can train.

Skydiver here.

It's not just money, it's not just skill that makes you a successful jumper.

It's a certain type of attitude and the ability to think when you've aimed yourself at a planet. Not everyone can do it. To be blunt, there is a large part of the population that shouldn't do it, because they have terrible decision making ability.

As far as money, I went through the student program in the mid 90's and it cost me about $1200, if I recall correctly. My first rig, used, was $4000. My second rig, new, was just over $8000. I have 4500 jumps most of which I paid ~ $20 each for. I don't want to do that math.

I'll do the reverse - I think most people would expect homebrewing beer to be quite hard to get started with, but for $50 you can get everything you need to start making a really quite good beer, and save money at the same time (homebrewed beer is usually much cheaper than store bought)

If you want to get started search for "brew in a bag" and buy a kit beer mix. You'll need a handful of equipment like a brew bag and fermenter, but that stuff is really cheap.

Then you can indeed go down a massive rabbit hole of refinements, but it just amazed me that the first beer you make will already be a good one.

Model trains. Sure, you can have a lot of fun with a 100 dollar toy train, but those brass engines are very shiny and very expensive.

Maybe not as expensive as the others, but crochet/knitting/sewing all start off fairly cheap, and then the next thing you know you're offering to service old men behind a Joann's fabric because you need this particular fabric and you need an entire bolt of it, and it's the one fabric in the entire fucking store that isn't on their amazing buy one get 73 free sale for the week.

Rock climbing. To start out you basically just need $150 worth of shoes and some $5 chalk. Trad climbing or big wall climbing can be 5 figures and a dozen years worth of experience. And the skill ceiling is probably obvious, but it's become an Olympic sport for a reason.

3D printing! You can start out cheap but you can get STUPID expensive, and it’s the biggest most meandering rabbit hole I know of

Keyboards are generally known about, but the ergo part of it is a rabbit hole within the rabbit hole. Some people literally design, 3D print, wire up, solder and program one-off keyboards because they don't like the ones made by other people.

Model railroads.

They fit both the signifigant monetary input and high skill criteria at the top end of the hobby.

Sim racing. An entry level wheel cost 100, an okay one 300 and the most expensive I've seen is 100,000

https://www.f1authentics.com/products/red-bull-simulator-championship-edition