For my homelab:
Mullvad: ~$6/month Domain: $8/year
And whatever cost for electricity for running a singular mini PC, Pi4, and my synology.
Cost isn't much.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Uhh i think i pay $70 every couple years for a vpn and thats kinda that.
$0
VPNs, search engines, absolutely everything and anything.
- ~~Wireshark~~ Wireguard (VPN): free
- SearxNG (Search Engine): free
- Equipment: widely varies
The whole idea of selfhosting is to cut out corporate subscriptions and to retain your privacy, security, anonymity, and data.
If the VPN is for phoning home, of course there's free client and server software.
But if it's for spoofing a different location, you either get found out, or you have to pay.
I wanna live in a world where I do not pay for anything but there is stuff that you can only really get if you pay.
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I pay for
My domain: $75 for 5 years
Usenet newsgroup access: $75 a year
Internet: $100 a month.
Domain and vps about 20 per year.
Spotify not because I am missing a navidrome server. But because I sometimes need the huge catalogue of it to browse.
Edit: 70 for protonvpn. Need those Linux isos.
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donations to lemmy devs and 2 fediverse servers are $10/month each, so $30/month total.
Domain was £50 for 10 years.
Usenet is £25 every 12 months.
Scaleway for a backup is about £1 a month.
Then I pay £10 a month for ente.io. I have all my familys on my account and I don't want to be in charge of self hosting it.
$6.50 for nabu casa (home assistant cloud)
ISP: $75/month for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and unlimited data. This is the biggest expense. All other options are 1-25 Mbps up with cable or dsl and most are just as expensive.
VPSs: around $40/month, though I'm planning to cut back a bit as I'm moving some stuff local.
2 Domains: < $30/year
The rest is purchased with no future subscription costs. This covers everything except for the security cams that I need to migrate off of corporate services one of these days.
I don't think you need too many subscriptions for self-hosting. Just the domain. And that's only if you want to be fancy. You can just use an IP address. Or services like Netbird give you a free domain (whatever.netbird.cloud). Uh, what else. Uh, the electricity subscription? My server idles at about 70w. It runs 24/7. (Netbird and Tailscale are free options for creating VPNs.)
That's kinda the point of self-hosting that you don't have subscriptions.
starting into homelab/selfhosting.
There is a 1-time up-front cost though. You need to acquire hardware and right now AI is messing everything up. Hardware is at an all time high. Maybe you can find more affordable used hardware somewhere.
The only subscription I have is Mullvad.
Any issues torrenting?
4€ a month for a VPS. Used to host a wireguard VPN and make my home server publicly accessible with restrictions
25€ a year for the domain name.
Domain only. Maybe $20 a year. Selfhosting email and VPN.
Last year I spent around £60 per months on subscriptions only. Plus internet £35, so nearly £100. This year I've stopped Apple (iCloud bs+), prime, Spotify, audible and replaced those with FOSS, this year a one time payment per year to a Usenet service, £60, and a vps at £5 months, the experience has changed and after a bit of adaptation it all now feels so much better than the shackled experience I used to have. Love everything about it! So all in all I used to have a budget of around £1200/year and now it's down to half of that and the experience is far far far better. I recommend it.! Would be interested now to look at what can be done with IPTV.