A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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All in, that’s $152/year. I’m probably going to add another $132/year if/when I can convince the rest of the family to move away from Gmail.
The VPS is for a few services that I don’t want to go down if my home internet connect goes down. And offsite backups are a must for me.
Suggest paying for a mini PC and hosting off of that opposed to a VPS, having a dedicated machine to tinker with is much easier, just have to beat the upfront cost.
RPi also works but can get sluggish quite easily.
Password manager for 10€/y and webspace which is free cuz I host some websites for money
Usenet access and domain registration are my only costs. Under $150 all in annually.
domain: $70 / year
VPS: $200 / year (~$17 / month)
everything else is basically free, for backups i use cloudflare R2's free plan and my local machine, i don't have media/storage servers so it's more than enough
For startup costs, ~80€ for a used micro PC a few years back (+100€ for a 1TB SSD for it).
Since then
I never bothered with electricity costs, since it's a small micro PC. It probably uses sub 20W average, which, next to an AC, fridge, and WFH costs, has to be negligible, the cost of buying a measuring device in itself is probably not worth it
It really depends on which services you need besides whatever hardware you have lying around.
For me it's a bit higher, as I used to host all my stuff on a rented dedicated box. Having an always on server in my bedroom didn't work for me, I have moved out since and built a local sever.
If you only need a public IP to reach your stuff, an even cheaper VPS should suffice.
Edit: forgot some stuff in the first pass
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #319 for this comm, first seen 27th May 2026, 20:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
That is it I think. I don't consider internet/water/electricity subscriptions as much as utilities.
Can't really afford anything else right now because my girlfriend as a cafe owner only brings in around 1200€/month or so working >60hr/week and we have a full renovation to pay for.
I want to dedicate like 10-20€/month to FOSS I use once the situation is better.
Many thousand dollars sunk into hardware. The electricity bill, I guess. Other than that, Mullvad is probably the only running cost related to self-hosting.
Technically, £0
I do have use Mullvad VPN, but not really for any of my hosting, and I do have a Hetzner VPS for my own site, which I have started using to access things. But I can access it all with Tailscale, which is free, as long as I can remember port numbers.
But with those taken into account;
Mullvad: £5 VPS: £15 Domain registration: £35pa
So all told it's about £22 a month.
I do need to look into donating to some of the services I use the most though.
I only pay for two .ca domain names, I originally was not self hosting when I got the first one so it is rather expensive as I use a different email address for every service/site I sign up for. I get next to no spam. The next domain I have as a test domain, I will be using it to test out things before I commit to them being on my main domain.
The first domain is something expensive, as they are currently doing all the hosting, the second one was something like $11 or $12. Once I get my test setup running I will move my main one over to my self hosted system.
Easynews and nzbgeek.
Well worth the 30euro each per year.
You said anything so I guess. VPN is like... $4 a month (that's what the math works out to for my three year sub).
Cloud service is like $10 a month
Music: $15 a month
Nebula: $5 a month
Password Manager: $1.33 a month
Internet: $90 a month
Phone: $30
Wikipedia: $5 a month
Servo: $5 a month
404 Media: $8.33 a month
That's all I can think of off the top of my head unless you want like rent and utilities and that.
Mullvad vpn. That's it.
I have internet at home, an electricity bill. A few domains and a VPS.
Domain about 10 per year (I pay for multiple years at a time), internet 55 per month with a static IP address
Beyond that I have a vpn that I use but was an early adopter so I have a lifetime subscription which cost me like a hundred bucks so call that 10 per year and getting less as time goes by, I have three other domain names not related to my homelab and webhosting also not related to my homelab. But by the time next year I should no longer be paying for any hosting. I bought a lifetime plexpass when it was like 125. Beyond that the costs are hardware and electricity and I just put an Enphase System Controller 3 and an IQ Combiner 5 on the house with 7.2kw of panels going on over the next few months and a couple IQ Battery 5P's so my power use for my homelab is basically covered.
That’s it for the recurring costs related in any way to my homelab.