As far as money...
We have been developing and testing AHL for the last 3+ months. Not to mention that we pay for ads on GFY and other places. We believe the price is fair.
All, I repeat, ALL our customers report great savings on bandwidth with AHL.
Remember, it does not only save your bandwidth, it also allows you to redirect hotlinkers to dialers, "for free sponsors" and even TGPs to increase trades and build bookmarkers. One client of ours makes $100+ per day just from that on his 50-70 mbps server. I will ask him if I can post his response from my ICQ history and will post it here later.
As far as "quite easy to build"
I am not saying it's impossible - we did it - some people can do it too.
Somehow, I did not find such a script in the last two years that I post movies and had to hire a programmer to do it. The idea to sell it came in when I saw how great AHL works for me.
So, if you can get it from your friend - get it. If it's worth your time and money - hire someone to do it for you and then test it on your own traffic to find all the bugs. If you want to PUT A CONDOM ON YOUR BANDWIDTH
and REDIRECT HOTLINKERS TO SPONSORS today - get AHL