Self hosting is actually crazy cheap compared to any kind of corporate solution. Anybody paying for SquareSpace, for instance, could cut their cost by a factor of 20 or more with a FOSS alternative like Ghost Blog.

I know my setup is over engineered a little so I pay a bit more, but my expenses are still under $100 per year for subscription services that support the self hosting.

$2.50 per month for a VPN.

$40 per year for two VPS’s (this is what I know I overpay for since I didn’t really know how much I needed when I set it up, but the time to change it is worth more to me than the extra $10 per year).

$17ish per year for a domain name.

Plex lifetime pass (around $100 one time).

And of course, ten million dollars in man hours spent learning how to use Linux.

It really isnt bad. I do most of my computer at home so I really only need a small cloud box to pipe things through when needed.

And I could reduce the B2 price a lot with some deduping of my data, but that's an ongoing and painfully slow process since I was too reckless with my local backups in the past, so $7 to avoid that process is worth it.

And for electric I suspect it's pretty low. I'm running 3 raspberry pi, a 4 bay NAS, and one micro PC and I live in an area with pretty cheap electric already. I think my gaming machine probably takes more power in a few hours than the rest of the system does in a day.