which explains why a ton of free or dead cheap usenet servers are situated in Germany.
The only reason to actually pay for usenet by now is if you want to download illegal stuff; the storage space needed for that is so massive that only an actual company can actually afford it.
of course these companies carry the text feeds mostly because it doesn't matter with the rest of the data, and some people never even realize that #usenet actually is a #forum and not some file-share #piracy site