Assuming you shoot a roll of film every single weekend, you end up spending 1k per year to develop it all.
Developing at home is not an option ( although I would be open to a magic machine that does it for me ).
You can Google around and find mail order processing for ~$5 a roll, and scan it yourself (flatbed with film-adapter, or for more money, dedicated film-scanning hardware that's usually much higher quality). You can develop black-and-white in a dark room yourself and probably get it cheaper. Not sure HN is the best venue for film-specific info, though; perhaps a film forum somewhere?
The first year I had a digital camera I shot over 2000.
I was happy with both, but now that I'm back on film, I'm VERY selective about my precious film.
Look through your film photographs and ask yourself if it was worth shooting each one and why. What value are you getting from capturing that moment. There's a chance a roll of film may last two weeks - cutting your cost in half.
For what it's worth, New Jersey Film Lab does good work.
And if you want to try developing, find a high school or college that has a lab and see what options they have. Black and white is a couple of hours to learn and develop your first roll. And, just as creative as the image capture process.
Granted, that first Mavica gave up a lot in quality compared with 35mm, but it's been a long time now since you had to make that tradeoff, and you can get a very nice APS-C body and lens kit for around $600. If you're primarily interested not in using film specifically so much as in in making photographs, that $600 kit can serve you just fine for a long time, at an incremental cost per shot of zero.
(Depending on body and system, you can even still use lenses made for film bodies - I haven't shot Grandpa's Nikkormat since the 90s, but I have quite recently shot its 50mm f/2 prime manufactured in 1967, on my D5300 body. Honestly, to my mind the lenses are at least 90% of what's worth keeping around from the film days, and it's often quite straightforward to use them with digital bodies whose capabilities vastly exceed anything a lot of those lens designers probably ever even imagined.)
I bought a Canon T2i with the EF 50-1.4 lens (far more expensive than the usual recommended EF-50 1.8) for $250 a few years ago. Although camera bodies do not deteriorate except when buying a heavily used camera with 20000+ shutter clicks, they still depreciate in value like all other consumer electronics. Consumer camera bodies have long since reached the "good enough" point for most users and now are just minor incremental evolutions. For Canon, that happened with the Canon XSi that introduced drastically improved autofocus and low light capabilities and especially the T2i that introduced full 1080p HD video support (T1i supported 1080 video but not at 30fps). This T2i replaced my previous Canon camera. My photography is effectively free. Let's just not talk about my lights and lenses...
The magic machine is called the C-41 process and they exist. :)
I mean, a "magic machine" would cost more than many years of lab services. It would use more expensive supplies than doing it by hand, especially because you wouldn't be doing the volume its designers expected. It would require a bunch of maintenance that's at least as hard as developing film. It would take up more space than any reasonable darkroom. It's hard to see why that would be an option when developing with tanks wouldn't be.
Also, digital is in fact a superior medium in 99.99999 percent of cases...
I have a pair of Jobo machines, an ATL3 and an ATL2200 with the tanks and do-dads that go with them.
I also have an Epson v850.
I used these ( and earlier setups that led to this ) in college after a lot of figuring on the solution to your question. I decided that for my time/money math, and considering the quality and control I was after, this was the best fit.
Now, I can’t keep up with scanning everything now that I have kids and a full time job and renovations to plan, and I consider selling the whole mess every other day ( the others, I consider buying a Contax 645 )
A solid halfway place is to get a great scanner ( not necessarily the one I have, unless you like big big film, see below for the counterpoint) and take the film to whatever drugstore nearby still has their Fuji stuff.
Or, get a hand tank.
Wait, it’s way simpler than you think. You somewhere dark, or a changing bag ( I put a towel under the door of a closet before getting a bag ) and then you need a sink. It isn’t super complicated for black and white, though medium format film is WAY easier to handle than 135. Making prints may come down to a yard sale or Craigslist score, but local college dark rooms likely aren’t full, and art kids are handy friends to have.
That didn’t likely help unless your main takeaway is held very close to “film is about the love of the game” not economics.
I definitely remember the developing to be much easier than the printing.
edit: To clarify, I believe home developing IS as good option these days. My opening question was rhetorical.
My workflow for 120mm films is to wait until I have more than 5-7 rolls and process them one by one: while the previous one is in the developer, the next one is in the fixer. In this way, you can process them all very fast.
My biggest concern, though, is the environment. In the past you had special places where you could dispose used chemicals. But even then very few people cared, most just wouldn't care. Today even the last bath bothers me - it should be thorough to be effective, and I'd just prefer not to waste the water so much.
It is real pity that a few decades after the digital revolution in photography we're very far from being able to obtain results close to film. All digital solutions such as Silver Efex are still very far from the real thing.
Note I haven't used any of the above yet; I've just recently revived my own interest in film, so had the info handy.
There are also some simpler products that just make the process a little easier, like the Lab Box[2] which basically just offers an easier way to load the film onto the spool. Developing B&W film with this type of machine is pretty easy and the chemicals are cheap.
$15-20 is about right for develop + scan costs these days.
You can try to save some money by having the lab develop only, then scan yourself. Though, in my experience scanning takes up an entire afternoon so the extra $8 for those Noritsu scans is worth it.
If you're open to mailing film, it looks Citizens Photo in Portland is the least expensive: https://lenslurker.com/film-developing-by-mail/
B&W film is quite forgiving of under/over-exposure, and it allows for push processing. On the flip side, every type of film has its own developing time & some mild chemical preference.
Color film isn't very DIY friendly, but it does have the benefit of being very consistent from a processing perspective.
From what I've seen, it's usually a difference of 2x or 3x in price for black and white vs. color (C41).
"Cheapest" way is to develop it yourself, but of course, that's a different set of skills and equipment you may not be into. There's online labs but I doubt they'll be cheaper either and are much slower.
I shoot film too and had my best luck in an immigrant neighborhood. I develop my films in a family business and it's never over $6 per roll. This is in Brooklyn, NY.
I used to use Replicolor in Salt Lake City and I’ve used photoworks in SF. Both are quality places and cost about the same.
You could save some money buy buying your own scanner ($500 for something high-ish quality, probably 250 used.
https://www.costcophotocenter.com/Prints
Note: I do believe you need a Costco membership
I went out and bought a Canon Full Frame mirrorless, and that was that.
If you're willing to stick with black and white you can get sort-of close to "magic machine that does it for you" using something like Cinestill monobath. That will do several rolls for $20. Then you have to scan yourself.
Think about it this way. A brand new high quality full frame digital camera will cost thousands of dollars. Film camera prices are going up, but you can still get a very nice 35mm film SLR for just a few hundred depending on which one you want. The lenses for the film camera are almost definitely going to be dramatically less expensive as well. Then you add the cost of film and developing over time and now you're pretty much just coming into the same price range as the digital camera.
TL;DR: digital and analog are about the same price over time, assuming you are buying a brand new digital camera.
The only way to do photography on the cheap is to use your phone (that you were going to buy anyway) or to buy an older/used digital camera. And if you are strapped for cash, that is exactly what I recommend. Why buy a new camera that is a low-end model when you can buy an older camera that was the top-tier professional camera of its day? For example, the Canon 5D Mark II can be had for just a few hundred bucks, and that's just one option of many.
Why not?
Have been a happy customer for years.