I went with the yearly unlimited subscription through Frugal. I believe I paid $39.00 for the year, plus it comes with a 500gb block account through Blocknews.

A good indexer is critical to your setup. Since I just started my Usenet journey a month ago, I can only recommend two: NZBgeek and Drunkenslug. There are many others that I’m sure are worth it, I just haven’t had time to test anything else. NZBgeek might not have open registrations right now.

I use SABnzbd as my downloader.

Other than that, one of the best resources I used when getting set up was TRaSH Guides. Endless guides on configuring your downloader, indexers, and much more. Do some research on Sonarr, Radarr, and the other arr programs. Takes a little bit of effort getting it all set up, but makes everything so easy once you’re done.

I can’t recommend an all-in-one primer, but if you want to look up guides independently, you’ll probably be most interested in these tools/services:

• a Usenet host (paid. they’re largely the same. Look for deals)
• a Usenet indexer site (analogous to a Pirate Bay type search engine). I like nzbgeek but there are hundreds. Many require a small annual fee and this may be worth it to you, but you can use free ones to test your initial setup.

A Usenet indexer is going to let you download .nzb files, which is analogous to downloading .torrent files from a torrent indexer. The nzb describes what posts in what newsgroups contain the files for a particular release.

• SABnzbd (download client, analogous to a torrent client like Transmission)
• browser plugins to simplify clicking an nzb download link and sending it to SABnzbd (not always needed if you’re running everything on your local machine, but important if your SAB instance runs on another server or in a Docker container)

If you’re looking to set up some extra infrastructure for automating a lot of steps, there’s also web apps to cover a ton of video use cases, like:

• Sonarr and Radarr (for monitoring specific tv shows and movies and automatically searching for nzbs, downloading them, and moving them to a final home on disk)
• Plex or Jellyfin (for providing a Netflix-like UI you can use to look for something to watch and then stream it to your browser/phone/TV)
• Overseerr (for a single interface to look for shows and movies and have them automatically added to Sonarr/Radarr.

I’d highly recommend setting up Docker and putting all of these apps into separate containers. Linuxserver creates easy to setup and update Docker packages for all these things. It’s also a great resource for finding other web apps you didn’t know you needed.

Paid services have consolidated to a great degree. But I’ve been a long time Easynews subscriber.

They have decent retention, good completion, and are johnny-on-the-spot re. DMCA requests.

Their real claim to fame is an easy to use browser based front end, so no third party client hassles and it works on mobile.

That said, MUCH has changed since the 90s, i.e. encrypted posts, the USENET hierarchy is largely broken and good luck finding any current text discussion (looking at you, Adobe, ya skeevy fucks).

Should you want more, this is a good guide. https://www.cogipas.com/how-to-use-usenet/

GL&HF