I have this too on occasion! Although, I think I had this problem on another podcast player before I switched.

Cheapest would probably be the Raspberry Pi/Orange Pi route.

I gave up trying to make an HTPC (using Kodi, ChimeraOS, etc). It wasn’t worth the hassle and ended up settling for an Apple TV.

Sure, you can use a VPN if you want to spin up the instance and connect to it without having a domain. You can always open the instance of Nextcloud to the internet later, when you buy a domain.

Get a cheap .XYZ domain if you just want to experiment with spinning up a reverse proxy.

I like it. If you don’t mind exporting your bank transactions once a month and importing them then it should work just fine for you.

Not a huge fan last time I used it

Same here