Selfhosted

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.

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.

• Dedicated Hetzner server + 10TB storage box: ~75€/month
• Netcup VPS (external monitoring): ~6.50€/month
• Kavita+ subscription for additional features: 5 USD/month (I think)
• Various domains: not sure, I have ~7 domains so another ~100€/year
• Mail: 90USD/year
• VPN: ~50USD/year (forgot to track this expense, oops)
• Backblaze B2: ~2€/month

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

For startup costs, ~80€ for a used micro PC a few years back (+100€ for a 1TB SSD for it).

Since then

• 6€/yr domain
• 48€/yr email (proton plus using domain above)
• I'm thinking of setting up Backblaze B2 for offsite backup, should be ~20€/yr for about 250GB stored continuously if I calculated right

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

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.

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.

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.

Only a VPN at around $65-70 per year.

Uhh i think i pay $70 every couple years for a vpn and thats kinda that.

The only subscription I have is Mullvad.

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.

Just domain for $11 a year.

The home server is running on old laptop so I guess slight electricity too. ISP doesn't really count since I work from home and need to pay for that anyway.

I have lifetime Windscribe VPN and Koofr 1TB, which are not subscriptions.

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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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