Uhh i think i pay $70 every couple years for a vpn and thats kinda that.
Wonky Coffee, about £30 per month.
Hey, you did say anything and everything...!
Wonky Coffee
Never heard of them, checked it out. That's a noble cause. I think we Americans especially, waste so much food it's downright embarrassing. Yet we make laws that say it is prohibited to feed the homeless. That's unconscionable imho. I strongly feel, we as a society, have a moral obligation to our fellow man to help when help is needed, no matter who they are or how they came to be in need.
I was tempted to say $0, but then I thought harder about the problem.
Technically I do have ongoing costs
- PAYG costs for Usenet-news (iirc, $22USD for 500GB block)
https://usenet-news.net/index1.php?url=home
- News indexer (I think...$60 every 5 years?)
Electricity (whatever tiny amount raspberry pi sips). At a guess, maybe $50/yr.
So, amortised over time - very low but not zero. In theory, if I dropped Usenet, it would even lower. And theoretically, I could run the pi off a single solar panel and a diy solar kit but I'm not busy pretending to be Robinson Crusoe just yet. Though... It might be a cool project.
You might want to consider Premiumize for Usenet (and torrent cache) at that price. Catch it on the Black Friday sale. I think it does NZB as well.
This is why torrents are better! I torrent the highest quality files I can find so I'd blow through that 500gb quickly.
Unlimited Usenet plans are pretty cheap to depending on sales.
Edit to add: I'm not a quality snob, but I'd probably blow through 500GB way too quickly.
Only a VPN at around $65-70 per year.
and here I thought the idea was to avoid to have subscriptions 🤣
domain: $70 / year
VPS: $200 / year (~$17 / month)
everything else is basically free, for backups i use cloudflare R2's free plan and my local machine, i don't have media/storage servers so it's more than enough
- Domain and DNS service: 30€/year
- VPS: 128€/year
- Usenet indexer: 15$/year
- Cloud storage for backup: 350€ + 280€ one time payments for 4TB total.
Domain for $8 a year and 300Mbps fiber for $45 a month which snake ass AT&T keeps increasing in 5 dollar increments, so thank you for reminding me to call Spectrum for a quote so I can then call AT&T and harass them into giving me the correct price for another year.
call Spectrum for a quote so I can then call AT&T and harass them into giving me the correct price for another year.
It's a shitty business model. Over the years I've found that in order to get the most out of Spectrum it is necessary to be a royal asshole and live in their phones. Here in this locale, Spectrum contracted with the local schools to be their ISP, so Spectrum became a utility just like water, power, etc. We even have a complaint form on our official county's website to facilitate being a royal asshole when necessary.
AT&T just bought my fiber provider

4€ a month for a VPS. Used to host a wireguard VPN and make my home server publicly accessible with restrictions
25€ a year for the domain name.
Last year I spent around £60 per months on subscriptions only. Plus internet £35, so nearly £100. This year I've stopped Apple (iCloud bs+), prime, Spotify, audible and replaced those with FOSS, this year a one time payment per year to a Usenet service, £60, and a vps at £5 months, the experience has changed and after a bit of adaptation it all now feels so much better than the shackled experience I used to have. Love everything about it! So all in all I used to have a budget of around £1200/year and now it's down to half of that and the experience is far far far better. I recommend it.! Would be interested now to look at what can be done with IPTV.
$0
- Domain 15€/yr
- Music 8.50€/month (trying to convince my girlfriend to move from Spotify to Qobuz
That is it I think. I don't consider internet/water/electricity subscriptions as much as utilities.
Can't really afford anything else right now because my girlfriend as a cafe owner only brings in around 1200€/month or so working >60hr/week and we have a full renovation to pay for.
I want to dedicate like 10-20€/month to FOSS I use once the situation is better.
Technically, £0
I do have use Mullvad VPN, but not really for any of my hosting, and I do have a Hetzner VPS for my own site, which I have started using to access things. But I can access it all with Tailscale, which is free, as long as I can remember port numbers.
But with those taken into account;
Mullvad: £5 VPS: £15 Domain registration: £35pa
So all told it's about £22 a month.
I do need to look into donating to some of the services I use the most though.
Thinking on it, I suppose the biggest cost is in terms of my time.
Up until this point, I've put quite a bit of time into learning how things work, and how to deploy things I'd find useful, and that can replace paid for services. Even now things are set up and running, I still have a tendency to fiddle with things. I've spent far more time on my Navidrome server than I ever did on Apple Music, put it that way. The same amount of time listening, mind.
Hosting for two:
- Domain - $300/yr (it's a great domain, don't judge me.)
- Proton Duo - $180/yr
- Kagi Duo - $168/yr
- Nabu Casa (Home Assistant) - $65/yr
- Donations to FOSS projects & initiatives - $250/yr
- Lingering security camera subscription (next to go) - $120/yr
- ISP Unlimited Data - $600/yr gofuckyourselfISP
- Typical added network load ~50W - $131/yr
- ~10yr Hardware Upgrades - $200/yr
I just upgraded my home storage setup, so offsite backup is now running at my parents house, saving me ~$250/yr (but probably costing them ~$50/yr in added utility costs)
Kagi Duo
I understand the concept, free search engines aren't free, but I'm just not there yet enough to pay for a search engine. I don't have ads on my network period, haven't in decades. I also filter heavily through pFsense and other means. So, while I am admittedly still contributing somewhat to a major search engine, at the very least I have still retained most of my data, and search results must be selected with prudence.
Why the nabu casa subscription? It sounds like everything they offer you (access from anywhere, backup, voice) is something that you could already do with your existing setup
Not OP
It also supports HA development, and keeps me from requiring my wife to understand tailscale.
Domain is about $15/yr
Email for my domain is $20/yr
VPN is about $50/yr
Which email host do you use? I can't decide which one to go for. I want something like migadu but they seem a bit scary with their message limits. The other option I have in mind is purelymail but I don't know if I trust them yet
Not who you replied ti, but I've been on purelymail for about a year and a half. No complaints. $10.yr is great, and their billing statements claim I could be around $3/year if I switched to their advanced billing. I have nagging concern that they're hosted on AWS, and if your goal is to completely free yourself of US tech giants, then purelymail won't.
Thanks for the input! Yeah, I haven't heard of any bad experience with them. Maybe I just need to take the leap of faith. Although the ownership change recently was a bit concerning but it seems like the operation quality hasn't reduced
My domain's registrar is namecheap, i tried their email on a whim, i've had no complaints in the 7ish years I've been using them. Privateemail.com
I checked it out, looks like they don't support catch all and have an artifical limitation on "aliases"
For me, I think I would like to have catch all working without paying too much
I pay for
My domain: $75 for 5 years
Usenet newsgroup access: $75 a year
Internet: $100 a month.
There are subscription costs for homelabbing?
Electricity. Off-site backup. FOSS project donations. Thigh-high socks. Domains.
Electricity $200 Off-site backup $130 FOSS project donations $800 Thigh-high socks $3600 Domains £150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
Thigh-high socks
They've even put programmer socks behind subscriptions, world is a fuck
Planned obsolescence means that the thigh high socks degrade quickly, forcing consumers to purchase new pairs more often than they really need too. The fabrics are now less resistant to excessive sweat, moisture, and oils. Shrinkflation also means you get less sock for the same amount of money, increasing the margins for the sock megacorporations. Additionally, the missing sock ghost (who routinely steals socks from a pairs leaving victims with just the one) has struck a deal with Big Programmer Socks to increase the number of lost sock pairs over time in exchange for a large share of the profits.
the missing sock ghost
This guy I have beef with. Also the missing keys fairy.
The socks, oh jesus the socks. So much money.
Suggest paying for a mini PC and hosting off of that opposed to a VPS, having a dedicated machine to tinker with is much easier, just have to beat the upfront cost.
RPi also works but can get sluggish quite easily.
- Domain for about 15/year
- Proton unlimited (mostly mail, SimpleLogin, vpn) about 90/year
- Nabu casa (not that I need it, but to support development) 75/year
I spend a lot more money on donations to the open source stuff I’m running, but they are not strictly speaking “subscriptions”. Self hosting for me isn’t about cost, it’s about data ownership.
For my homelab:
Mullvad: ~$6/month Domain: $8/year
And whatever cost for electricity for running a singular mini PC, Pi4, and my synology.
Cost isn't much.
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