Stacked against us

Welcome to the exciting world of low/no-budget world of independent filmmaking! Whee!
So, New York City is charging $300 for a permit application. At least they're still not charging for police and street closures. I love how all the people they interview are like "that's just a drop in the bucket". Yeah, for a multi-million dollar picture it is. But for a micro studio like us that's upwards of 5% of our budget.
Of course, the entire system is stacked against us. The big soundstages made sure the law giving filmmakers tax credits doesn't apply to productions that don't use their soundstages. Which, of course, we cannot afford.
So yeah, it's hard being a small business.

Oh, and on that same vein, we've discovered of late that cable VOD stations are insisting on closed-captioning of movies. For an outside company to do that for us, it looks like that'll be $900 to $1500 out-of-pocket money to get those done. Which economically makes the deliverable requirements of closed-captions  them simply absurd -- we can't make any money with VOD if we have to spend a thousand more dollars just to get them the movie. There's a slight chance we could figure out how to do this in-house, but I'm sure that 1. it'll take a long time to figure out and 2. we'll expend a lot of hours only to have to make a DigiBeta tape (hello 1995) and make a mistake on it somehow and we'll end up owing the VOD service more than we get paid.