16 terabytes per drive, mirrored in RAID, moving over 10 gigabit - that's what kills the cloud bill.
2 terabytes of iCloud rents for about $10 a month. Google Drive charges the same for the same 2. Neither copy is yours.
1 Synology drive is 16 terabytes. 8x the space, paid once.
RAID is the safety layer. Every file gets duplicated across drives, so 1 dead drive costs you a drive, not a decade of photos. That's the exact promise the cloud charges rent for.
10 gigabit LAN is the speed layer. 200GB of footage to a cloud account is an overnight job. Over 10 gigabit it's minutes. Drop 1 SSD in as the working drive and active projects open at local speed - no sync, no download, no spinner.
The software is the real reason Synology over a bare box.
Web apps for files and backup. iOS and Android apps that auto-pull every photo and video off the phone and the tablet, same behavior as iCloud, none of the bill.
Then the media layer. Movies. A full music library served to any device - the thing Spotify and Apple Music charge $12 a month to rent you.
Put a second unit in another location and one backs up the other. Off-site redundancy, 0 monthly cost.
4 subscriptions gone. 1 box. Hardware that's paid off in a year and keeps working for 8 more.
Stop paying iCloud and your photos go dark. The drive just spins.