Why does it cost $12 per tape to digitize it? I recently digitized a giant pile of old home movies, and all it took was an $80 usb video capture device, $20 thrift store VCR, and a few minutes each. About every dozen tapes I had to take the cover off and clean the heads, but that was no big deal.

Some older tapes will need a time base corrector to rebuild the sync signals, but they aren't that expensive.