Self-Hosted Main

Domain and use it for email

I pay my ISP for internet, and a domain registrar for my domain name, and backblaze for cloud backup.

That's really it.

1Password (I actually get to via work), nextdns and Home Assistant.

3$ a month for real debrid: to download Linux iso 2$ a month for YouTube premium family plan: from a different country for cheap rates 10$ for 2 years nordvpn: black Friday deal Around 5$ a month Hulu after an Amex offer 140$ for 500gb pcloud for backups, lifetime. Then I have automated backups of that in a different country where I have an rpi connected to an external hdd.

migadu for email

rsync.net - Haven‘t tested it yet, but the pricing and their offering looks really awesome.

Bitwarden I am also paying for, but I use the license for my self-hosted Instance.

Bitwarden’s $10 priceing a year is absolutely the most fair pricing that exists. They will keep me as a loyal customers.

Bitwarden is 100% worth the $10 a year. And is independant of my selfhosting dickery.

Plex and a VPN are a lot cheaper than streaming services these days.

Proton mail

Pushover. One time payment that covers lifetime push messages.

HA cloud. Apple iCloud storage.

Real-debrid and bitwarden, both are amazing and dirt cheap

Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, anyone?)

I mean I get that's a strange mention here, but with the value I've got from it (like being able to reference content of some website *in point of time* knowing it may change or even completely die) I somehow feel obligated to send at least a few tens of dollars per year. Also they have matching donations campaign around Christmas (at least that's how it was in recent years), so it's a nice idea donate right then.

Backblaze b2 backup. I'm backing up almost 500gb of personal data (compressed and only things I can't get back easy) for less than $2\month.

I don’t know how many times I have to say this: selfhosting is about more than saving money.

In other words, sometimes paying for a service you could selfhost is the right call. In most cases, if you can manage a self-hosting setup, your time is worth more than the cost of cloud services. TBH, I do it for data governance reasons more than cost.

It’s not either/or and it’s not about going “off-grid” for a lot of people.

Fastmail, LastPass and NordVPN

Bitwarden and Email.

I trust a company like Bitwarden to handle uptime of my password manager more than I do myself. If most of my selfhosted services went down, I'm gonna be a little annoyed, but I can survive. If Bitwarden goes down, that's a real PITA.

And email, because f**k trying to self host email successfully, I've accepted I'll just have to use a commercial provider for emails. I'll try and set up a self hosted server at some point, but on a separate domain and most likely just to mess around/learn.

PIA 3 years for like 80$

Seedbox for, I dont even know

and icloud for a dollar a month

mullvad is worth it for not having any data caps

I supported Bitwarden for at least 5 years, and like you.... walked over the $10/year bridge. I setup my own Vaultwarden about 2 weeks ago with off-site backups... I'm fine with this responsibility, but I waved goodbye to them.

I continue to support Proton (now Business) for custom domain e-mail & VPN. They don't offer port forwarding, so I still support AirVPN for personal reasons. I tried out WireShark & was not impressed with latency/packet loss monitoring at their nearby endpoints.

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I support BackBlaze B2 for all off-site backups -- excellent low-cost provider for my "Cloud" backups.

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I run Home Assistant locally, but I'd definitely support their Cloud project if I needed a greater home acceptance factor... very similar to supporting Proton & Bitwarden in their beginnings. I appreciate them not paywalling features.

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I ran away from Blue Iris Surveillance & adopted Frigate about 6 months ago -- best decision I ever made. I love running Frigate with a GPU for AI.

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If you waved a magic wand around 8-10 years ago & told everyone they'd be drowning in smartphone photos & privacy issues with Google, 9/10 would not have believed you. That's about when I left Google Drive permanently back then & have been running Nextcloud since. I am glad to see masses of people finally leaving Google Photos. I also run PhotoPrism as my long-term photo manager to visualize "life" for our family. Absolutely zero money flowing into the hands of Google now. They tossed their Google Domains Beta idea into the trash can of another entity I accidentally supported earlier in life -- SquareSpace. When Google announced the sale of Google Domains to SquareSpace, I moved all domains to CloudFlare within a week. Thanks SquareSpace, but I can run my own Ghost & Jekyll blogs for free now thanks to this great OSS community.

I pay migadu to host my custom email domain. Well worth it. I tried self-hosting email, and it was too much of a pain for me.

Noip $25/year

Pushover

Not vps but adjacent: I have a Dreamhost storage account to sync my Joplin notes. It's so very very smol it barely costs anything. The notes are E2EE with a key I own.

Unsure if this classifies as cheap but:

• BitWarden
• AnonAddy - I use the extension and create an email for every website. Wish I knew this years ago.
• Proton Unlimited for email and VPN
• YouTube Premium - I watch a lot of YT and this is a great use of money. YT Music has also great radio station generation, in fact I think better than Spotify and Apple Music in my experience.
• Apple Music for the car and less less/Atmos audio. It’s lovely in the living room.

Fastmail. Left Gmail for it like a decade ago and have been happy with it ever since. It really is fast.

ChatGPT Plus is the only service I pay for. There's literally no substitute in my experience. Even with 10 million dollars, I couldn't effectively replace it with a self-hosted option.

1password, best $36 spent. I also pay for YT premium.

• CopyMeThat shopping lists, meal plans, recipes. Lifetime price was $25 (which currently brings it to an annual price of $2.8 for me :D), and it has better features than selfhosted versions. Still would like to switch, especially after they had an annoying outage, but still holding out for improvements in the oss versions.
• Nabu Casa Cloud (Home Assistant), mainly to support them, some minor benefits.
• Open AI API, because getting a GPU that can run any decently sized LLM would cost decades of what I pay Open AI ;)
• Backblaze Personal Backups for my PC and B2 for my server
• Mullvad VPN forrrrrrr nothing special.

Bitwarden and NextDNS. They're so cheap so what the heck.