His theory seems to be that if you have a bunch of these, they will add up. Maybe, but I can't buy the argument without more and better examples to back it up.
I mean, if you had Protonmail and a $5/mo VPN, you'd still be spending less than the cost of a standard Netflix subscription. And if you stopped subscribing to Netflix because you cared about privacy, you'd be SAVING money.
He does bring up a good point, which is that you need to have a certain amount of technical fluency to do this stuff. The other example he lists is the Pi-hole: does he think the cost of a $35 Raspberry Pi is what's keeping most people from running this software? That's not it at all: it's the obscurity of the project, and the knowledge it takes to set it up. There are plenty of people in the world for whom $35 is a big expense, but the number of people who are prevented from using one because of the cost is very low.