The article is right about the money and misses what people are actually buying. Nobody self-hosts photos to save money. They do it to stop renting access to their own files.
The honest accounting has three columns: cloud costs money forever, self-hosting costs time forever, and both are fine trades when you know you are making them.
The option that rarely comes up in these debates is the boring middle: local-first apps on hardware you already own. No monthly fee, no server to patch, files in plain folders you control.
That covers organising, searching and keeping the archive yours. It does not cover off-site copies or phone auto-upload, so most people still pair it with one dumb storage target. Disclosure: I build a paid Mac app in that local-first category, which is why I notice the gap. For beginners my advice is to start local-first and add a server only when a concrete need forces it. That way nobody ends up as the person who quit self-hosting.
Who ever said this was about money?!
This is true, self hosting doesn’t save you money. It is, in fact, more expensive and costs your time.
This is because modern technology isn’t sold to you as a product, it’s sold to you as a loss leader so that you use their products and let them spy on you so that they can sell that data to advertisers or anybody who can complete an ACH transfer.
Your options are
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Use commercial services and sell your privacy in exchange for cheap consumer electronics which will be obsolete next year either by design or through engineered hardware failure.
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Setup the services on your own devices and pay the cost in hardware and free time.
In one scenario you spend a bit more money, in the other scenario you don’t have privacy. Everyone gets to choose which is more important.
I dont know that they are loss leaders, apple, google and samsung have €2k+ phones. But yeah its about data, control being sold as convenience.
I miss settings menus in everything.
At the top end, they’re probably not subsidized… but if you’re getting by on a $100 phone, it’s likely a $100 piece of spyware that sold your data to pay for 2/3rds of your phone.
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So where can I put 130TB of files for less than $10/TB (what I paid for my HDDs) plus about 50¢ per day in electricity?
On backblaze I’d be spending $910… PER MONTH and I wouldn’t even have unlimited access to my files.
This has to be rage bait.
I don’t think beginners are going to be in that situation and most people probably won’t ever be in your situation, mostly people doing it as a hobby are going to end up with 100+ TB of data.
EDIT: when I say “most people wouldn’t be in that situation” I was thinking of the typical person who is on the fence about this and would be swayed by the “it will save you money” argument. Its quite likely that most people currently self hosting (I’d imagine mostly hobbyists) could be in a similar situation to you if they aren’t already
Beginners can recycle an old mini/micro PC. You can buy refurbished ones from computer recyclers for like $15.
At both ends of the spectrum you can save money. The people who don’t (like me) are not doing it for the goal of saving money.
I think your discounting the amount I save on my heating bill.
Whoever thinks self-hosting is about saving money has grossly misunderstood technology…and people, for that matter.
Self-hosting will not give your mouth sex appeal
Self-hosting will not get rid of the nubs
Self-hosting will not make you look five pounds thinner
That last one … Spend all your money on hardware and you won’t be able to afford food. You may lose weight…
Fair point. Especially at the current HW prices, you can starve pretty quickly.
Maybe I should have paraphrased “Whitey’s on the moon” instead. “Data centres on the moon”?
Huh?! My server and a 8tb external hdd costed me 40k inr (bought 1.5 years ago). It consumes less than 200-300inr worth of electricity per month. With that I am self-hosting Immich, Jellyfin, Paperless-ngx, Vaultwarden (Used by 7-8 users with family organisation), Firefly-iii, linkwarden, a central syncthing nodes which is synced with my client devices, media tracker, arr stack with qbittorrent. With a Proton VPN subscription of 7.5k inr/year and backblaze for cloud backs about 150inr per month, it costs me just ~10k (~100usd) a year in runnings costs for subscriptions worth of 50-60k a year. With those savings I can literally buy a really good Moped every 2-3 years. Granted my nvme in the server is due replacement in a year because it is a lower quality one and has already worn out by 40%. But it definitely saves a ton of money when you have cheap electricity.
Im not even going to bother clicking this piece of shit article, thats bullshit fuelled by big money, an insignificant piece of opinion for low IQ victims.
Yeah idk my power bill hasn’t gone up and I have 0 subscriptions for TV and photo backup so yeah this article is clearly bs
I self host using a laptop that has a broken screen and uses 10watts of power.
The only cost was replacing the main drive that died after a few years and it was $80.
Pretty sure it is saving me money, since the laptop would have been e-waste otherwise.
That if is quite significant, as everything that follows is meaningless, as far as I’m concerned. Hilarious, considering that no one with the skills and intentions, will ever be moved by what was given as supposedly good and valid reasons not to self host. To rephrase, the author stated, if you care for sugar, don’t eat the lettuce.
Fine. Don’t do it to save money. Do it because we are sick and tired of outsourcing everything to a damn subscription and owning and controlling nothing in our lives anymore.
I’ve actually start branching out now since i have a reliable stack. Docker apps are great and fun to configure (less than have the time). So many things I can do with a computer. I found Stash last month and its been crazy how it improved my workflow
Exactly — money is not the only cost nor benefit. It’s fun, it gives me control, it’s not going to get acquired and trashed, etc.
Sounds like something a hosting service would say.
I’ve never heard of anyone approaching the topic to save money. It’s either privacy/ownership or just goofing around with old hardware
Also if all of the hardware is recycled that seems like an easy way to avoid paying anything at all
It’s going take me roughly 8 months to break even on the savings from subscription.
Assuming I value my time at -10 dollars a month…
I mean, saving subscription costs is one draw for me personally, but at that point it’s a matter of making up my hardware investment cost versus the subscription costs over time. This isn’t an instant money saver, and it never was.
also:
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I hate jumping around between apps to figure out what i want to watch.
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media consolidation is a shitshow and I refuse to give any more money to the industry, especially regressive propaganda machine Fox Corp.
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