How I replaced paid hosting with a €100 home server (and saved hundreds)

The slow bleed of cloud costs A few years ago, I did a rough calculation of everything I was paying for hosting. VPS here, managed instance there, a database service I barely touched. Nothing individually catastrophic — but add it all up and I was spending somewhere between €150 and €200 per year on infrastructure for projects that maybe five people used, including me. The worst part? Most of it was idle. Side projects running 24/7 “just in case.” APIs that handled a handful of requests per day sitting on machines provisioned for production workloads. But here’s what I hadn’t fully accounted for: the SaaS subscriptions on top of that. Password manager, note-taking app, file sync, photo backup, private Git — small monthly fees that, combined, easily added another €10–15 per month. Services I was paying for, where the open source alternative exists and runs perfectly well on your own hardware. I wasn’t paying for what I used. I was paying for the comfort of not thinking about it. Then I