Ask HN: What purchase under $1000 has changed your life the most?

I bought a high speed sheet-fed scanner to be used with paperless-ngx based on a recent thread on HN. Before that my filing system for financial statements and other important documents was verging on meltdown and causing me considerable anxiety, but now that burden has been lifted. The scanner is configured to send documents directly to a home network file server that's always on and will store them until the next time I boot my desktop rig, so it's nearly frictionless to drop every piece of mail that comes through the door immediately into the scanner, which has a box under it, instead of piling it up on my desk where it used to stay for months. I wish I started this years ago and I thank everyone who contributed to that thread. Honorable mention: a printer with liquid ink tanks for £100 with thousands of pages worth of ink has just replaced a £30 inkjet printer I got ten years ago that made me cough up another £30 or £40 pounds every time the cartridges ran out. It's expensive to be poor.

The scanner is an Epson ES-580W, but any model would be adequate that can scan directly to a network folder by FTP or FTPS over wifi or ethernet. Some are claimed to support SFTP but I think the copywriter meant FTPS. They seem to follow the network protocol standards well enough to work with Linux even without any special drivers. Although the scanner interacts with my file server, I prefer to run paperless-ngx on my desktop, so an incron job runs on the file server to copy the scanned documents to the desktop if the latter is on line but retain them otherwise, and a startup script on the desktop copies the retained scanned documents from the file server whenever the desktop boots.