How many and how much are your subscriptions?
from Squizzy@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 27 May 19:10
https://lemmy.world/post/47423078
from Squizzy@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 27 May 19:10
https://lemmy.world/post/47423078
I am trying to capture costs for starting into homelab/selfhosting.
VPNs, search engines, absolutely everything and anything.
threaded - newest
There are subscription costs for homelabbing?
Electricity. Off-site backup. FOSS project donations. Thigh-high socks. Domains.
They’ve even put programmer socks behind subscriptions, world is a fuck
Planned obsolescence means that the thigh high socks degrade quickly, forcing consumers to purchase new pairs more often than they really need too. The fabrics are now less resistant to excessive sweat, moisture, and oils. Shrinkflation also means you get less sock for the same amount of money, increasing the margins for the sock megacorporations. Additionally, the missing sock ghost (who routinely steals socks from a pairs leaving victims with just the one) has struck a deal with Big Programmer Socks to increase the number of lost sock pairs over time in exchange for a large share of the profits.
This guy I have beef with. Also the missing keys fairy.
The socks, oh jesus the socks. So much money.
Electricity $200 Off-site backup $130 FOSS project donations $800 Thigh-high socks $3600 Domains £150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
Im good at the economy. If you turn off the electricity you have an extra $300 for your Thigh-high socks
I hear of VPS and VPN, then there is domains and loads I dont know about.
WiresharkWireguard (VPN): freeThe whole idea of selfhosting is to cut out corporate subscriptions and to retain your privacy, security, anonymity, and data.
Wireshark has to be a typo right? I never knew the packet capture program did that.
Ahhh fuck Wireguard. This old brain is not functioning today.
To be fair, Wireshark is a far more memorable name than Wireguard. Sharks are very cool!
I am very concerned about selfhosting and exposing my network to the internet. I thought people had VPS etc.
A VPS is a Virtual Private Server, such as one would rent from a provider like digitalocean.com com or similar. Most of the crew here run their homelab off of equipment located in their residence. If a VPS is the path you’d like to take, then that would be a subscription. If you have equipment in your physical possession, that is yet another path. Either way, security is of utmost importance.
Tailscale being an alternative to a VPS then?
Tailscale is a layer on top of wireguard and is a VPN. Don’t open your home to the outside world, that’s just asking for trouble.
Tailscale is a great choice for you at this stage for accessing your stuff from anywhere and not worrying about anyone else. Downside is if Tailscale decides to enshittify some day you (a lot of us) will have to figure what our next move is.
For the casual and/or beginner, it really is an excellent service even at the free tier.
Tailscale is a kind of VPN (virtual private network) not a VPS (virtual private server).
Tailscale is a VPN (Virtual Private Network) which is different than a VPS (Virtual Private Server).
ETA: Oops. I see your question has been answered multiple times. It seems you are a beginner at selfhosting and trying to get a grip on what’s necessary to start and trying to wrap your brain around all the acronyms. There is absolutely no shame in being a beginner. Everyone in this community was a beginner at some point in their life. So, don’t be bashful about asking questions. I’ve found the folks here to be patient and helpful.
Selfhosting on a VPS can have its use cases (piracy). If you are worried about exposing it to the internet just don’t and ise company profiles on your devices to automatically connect your network using VPN
Do you mean a VPN? Tailscale has a free tier, or you can run a headscale instance on whatever hardware you like.
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.
Yeah. I just thu that in there thinking that in as an example. Of course, you’re right, you’d get clinked.
$6.50 for nabu casa (home assistant cloud)
Password manager for 10€/y and webspace which is free cuz I host some websites for money
Which password manager do you use?
Oh it’s actually more like 20€/y i just realized, $19,80 to be exact. Bitwarden. But there was a post the other day that enshittification is going to start soon so idk what I will get then. If there is no good alternative I will probably start selfhosting that too
i swapped to proton pass
I’m in the same boat and looking for alternatives.
The first one I tried was Psono, basics worked ok but I didn’t like how there was no keybinding to auto fill passwords. Another negative was the session handling, you’d either need a complete login including 2FA or keep the session active at all times without any prompt for the master password even after a restart.
Run your own vaultwarden, you get to use all the bitwarden things for free. With rumours of enshitification coming let the people who do not do the self hosting pay for the development. If I had the money to donate I would have stopped the moment I heard the enshitification rumours.
I don’t want to worry about my password manager being down if I ever have a total outage for any reason
Last time my power was out all of my vaultwarden passwords were on my bitwarden install on my phone.
Run your own Vaultwarden service. Its FOSS, and works with Bitwarden clients.
I currently pay for Bitwarden and self host Vaultwarden. As long as we can still use the Bitwarden app with Vaultwarden, I won’t have a problem.
There isn’t another password solution I want to use currently.
If we lose that self-hosted feature for Vaultwarden I will jump ship to a keepass compliant solution.
I guess we could still fork the current Bitwarden client?
I would hope so. That and the extensions.
$2 per year for my domain name.
Aside from domain costs, I don’t pay for any extra services in regards to my homelab. I pay for email as well because I don’t want to manage that.
Domain is about $15/yr
Email for my domain is $20/yr
VPN is about $50/yr
Yeah thats… Pretty much it for me.
Unless we want to include donations? But that doesnt fit the word “subscription” IMO.
Which email host do you use? I can’t decide which one to go for. I want something like migadu but they seem a bit scary with their message limits. The other option I have in mind is purelymail but I don’t know if I trust them yet
My domain’s registrar is namecheap, i tried their email on a whim, i’ve had no complaints in the 7ish years I’ve been using them. Privateemail.com
I checked it out, looks like they don’t support catch all and have an artifical limitation on “aliases”
For me, I think I would like to have catch all working without paying too much
Not who you replied ti, but I’ve been on purelymail for about a year and a half. No complaints. $10.yr is great, and their billing statements claim I could be around $3/year if I switched to their advanced billing. I have nagging concern that they’re hosted on AWS, and if your goal is to completely free yourself of US tech giants, then purelymail won’t.
Thanks for the input! Yeah, I haven’t heard of any bad experience with them. Maybe I just need to take the leap of faith. Although the ownership change recently was a bit concerning but it seems like the operation quality hasn’t reduced
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.
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.
I spend a lot more money on donations to the open source stuff I’m running, but they are not strictly speaking “subscriptions”. Self hosting for me isn’t about cost, it’s about data ownership.
Yearly:
Not counting ISP since we have that anyways.
What are you using those 6 domains for? Genuine question btw
Two are fedi instances, one is “official (related to my legal name)” and mostly used for email, one for personal selfhosted stuff I want to access from outside without vpn (like this Lemmy instance), one used to be a local concert calendar which I sunset so it’s not needed anymore. Currently forgot the sixth one lol
0.26€/kWh? Jeez I thought $0.14 CAD during peak was bad
Wow… In Italy the average for households is 0.28-0.33
Our green party is and was historically the main anti-nuclear power sponsor
Yeah it’s like that in Europe. Part of it is covered by my mini photovoltaic (600Wp), but that’s not enough.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #319 for this comm, first seen 27th May 2026, 20:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
is that a bundle, or are you rally paying like $0.50 a month for a VPS?
It’s a vps from ionos and the 1€ per month was actually the 1gb ram version. I have since upgraded to a 3€ with 4gb I think so not entirely accurate. Domain is afaik 1 per month.
.
That’s it for the recurring costs related in any way to my homelab.
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
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.
I have internet at home, an electricity bill. A few domains and a VPS.
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.
Mullvad vpn. That’s it.
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
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.
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.
donations to lemmy devs and 2 fediverse servers are $10/month each, so $30/month total.
Domain only. Maybe $20 a year. Selfhosting email and VPN.
Easynews and nzbgeek.
Well worth the 30euro each per year.
Hosting for two:
I just upgraded my home storage setup, so offsite backup is now running at my parents house, saving me ~$250/yr (but probably costing them ~$50/yr in added utility costs)
Why the nabu casa subscription? It sounds like everything they offer you (access from anywhere, backup, voice) is something that you could already do with your existing setup
Not OP
It also supports HA development, and keeps me from requiring my wife to understand tailscale.
I understand the concept, free search engines aren’t free, but I’m just not there yet enough to pay for a search engine. I don’t have ads on my network period, haven’t in decades. I also filter heavily through pFsense and other means. So, while I am admittedly still contributing somewhat to a major search engine, at the very least I have still retained most of my data, and search results must be selected with prudence.
If you’re interested, try something like searxng and route it through a VPN or vps.
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.
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.
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.
Usenet access and domain registration are my only costs. Under $150 all in annually.
I pay for
My domain: $75 for 5 years
Usenet newsgroup access: $75 a year
Internet: $100 a month.
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.
$0
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.
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.
Thinking on it, I suppose the biggest cost is in terms of my time.
Up until this point, I’ve put quite a bit of time into learning how things work, and how to deploy things I’d find useful, and that can replace paid for services. Even now things are set up and running, I still have a tendency to fiddle with things. I’ve spent far more time on my Navidrome server than I ever did on Apple Music, put it that way. The same amount of time listening, mind.
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.
Domain for $8 a year and 300Mbps fiber for $45 a month which snake ass AT&T keeps increasing in 5 dollar increments, so thank you for reminding me to call Spectrum for a quote so I can then call AT&T and harass them into giving me the correct price for another year.
AT&T just bought my fiber provider
<img alt="" src="https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/1a0400c5-5977-459f-a15c-44d124cbd92f.gif">
It’s a shitty business model. Over the years I’ve found that in order to get the most out of Spectrum it is necessary to be a royal asshole and live in their phones. Here in this locale, Spectrum contracted with the local schools to be their ISP, so Spectrum became a utility just like water, power, etc. We even have a complaint form on our official county’s website to facilitate being a royal asshole when necessary.
and here I thought the idea was to avoid to have subscriptions 🤣
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
Only a VPN at around $65-70 per year.
What!! Unless your VPN is hooked up through a NASA telescope and transmits your data through space and time 70 bucks per year is a SCAMMM!!! $70 every two/three years, that makes more sense.
Wonky Coffee, about £30 per month.
Hey, you did say anything and everything…!
Never heard of them, checked it out. That’s a noble cause. I think we Americans especially, waste so much food it’s downright embarrassing. Yet we make laws that say it is prohibited to feed the homeless. That’s unconscionable imho. I strongly feel, we as a society, have a moral obligation to our fellow man to help when help is needed, no matter who they are or how they came to be in need.
Uhh i think i pay $70 every couple years for a vpn and thats kinda that.