The Total Cost of Self-Hosting: Servers, Time, and Maintenance

The Total Cost of Self-Hosting: Servers, Time, and Maintenance Self-hosting saves money on subscriptions. But servers, setup time, and maintenance aren't free. Here's the honest math. The Three Costs of Self-Hosting 1. Infrastructure (Monthly) Tier Specs Hetzner DigitalOcean Linode Small (1-3 tools) 2 vCPU, 4 GB $4.50 $24 $24 Medium (4-8 tools) 4 vCPU, 8 GB $7 $48 $48 Large (10-15 tools) 6 vCPU, 16 GB $14 $96 $96 Full stack (15+ tools) 8 vCPU, 32 GB $27 $192 $192 Additional costs: | Item | Monthly Cost | |------|-------------| | Backups (Backblaze B2) | $1-5 | | Domain name | $1 | | SSL certificate | $0 (Let's Encrypt) | | Email (SMTP relay) | $0-5 | | Total extras | $2-11 | 2. Setup Time (One-Time) Tool Complexity Setup Time Examples Simple 30 min Uptime Kuma, Plausible, Umami Medium 1-2 hours Mattermost, Cal.com, Listmonk Complex 2-4 hours Keycloak, Supabase, Grafana stack Very complex 4-8 hours Nextcloud (with integrations), GitLab Typical full-stack setup (10 tools): 15-25 hours Wh