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.