Most people want services to be synced across devices. Using the budget app example, I just couldn't possibly do all of my budget tasks from my phone alone. It's too limited of a screen size and not all features are available within the app.

Look at Nextcloud for example. You can have a Google Drive alternative without google having any of your files. For some people it's more important for others less. You also get more control of what you can do with it (for example add plugins etc.). It just depends on how you want to live your life. For example you can just create a Google account and have everything setup for you, or you can selfhost something like NC and setup everything your way.

I think most of the answers here are kinda lame. It's not easier to deal with networking rules or backups or flakey consumer grade Internet or power outages or redundancy or a lot of other things.

The only things I find value in self hosting are functional things for the home.. A bittorrent client with web front end, plex server, file server for the plex server, a home automation stack, or as a cheap sandbox for testing new software..

You'd save a lot of time and energy just using web or mobile based apps where appropriate. The day to day reliability of those kind of apps will be better as well.

If someone is doing this for a hobby, great. Enjoy. It's not practical for the overwhelming majority of people though. I say this as someone who's literal job is ensuring reliability of web services.. I am more than capable of doing all this but I'm also practical about seeing when it's a net benefit vs a time/energy suck.

I dont understand it either. I host on a VPS, because I trust my hoster more than my ISP and more than my own security-skills. Also its cheaper than running own hardware.

Google recently had several cases of - which looks to be a developing situation - user personal data losses in the google drive side of operations

Thats right, the SaaS infrastructure that is based on storing user data on a cloud system lost about months of user data

Netflix recently also starting pulling toxic, egregious changes such that its basically insulting to people giving money to them

I have hardware laying around i decide to put to use. In the 3rd world a chatgpt subscription is the equivalent of $100 a month for very little benefit. Instead of queueing and using other people's free resources better to use my own. There are also other reasons like backup strategy using cloud, NAS and archives which require your own hardware. A 1U chassis can fit a chinese recycled board with decent specs, a gpu and 4 hot swap drives cheap. Does decently if you pair with good network hardware so you only wake it up when needed. I use mikrotik for networking. Ive come to a point where my skills are good and paying for the cloud is a big waste.