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.
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.