Self-Hosted Main

• tasks.org - $1/year
• ardour - $1/month
• tasker (autoapps on android) - $1/month

Don’t even use them anymore. But as I wouldn’t miss it, I’ll keep it going to support the devs.

Albeit more than 30 annually but I still consider cheap/good value:

Exchange online few domains streaming services (TV and music because WAF)

Its not actually cheap but im all for my proton enterprise plan.

VPS for wire guard tunnel, because fucking ISP CGNAT $5/month

Usenet provider and private indexer roughly $10/month

1Password NextDNS iCloud ProtonMail

Bitwarden & PurelyMail for me.

I have just loaded $10 initially for PurelyMail & it works great for simple outbound emails from my homelab services.

Hertzner storage box for backups 1tb cheap as chips Daily backups from proxmox

Fastmail and nextdns. I'm still paying for iCloud, but I intend to move everything to my local server.

I go on and off streaming services: Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO.

Amazon Prime, which includes a bunch of goodies.

Kindle Unlimited. I usually wait for promotions since there isn't a ton of material I like that I haven't read yet. Also I'm rather busy lately.

Proton Suite

Im into fitness so: Lose it! and Hevy (dont know if there are good selfhosted alternatives)

Mullvad Bitwarden Goodnotes cuz im studying right now and make notes on my iPad

Windscribe vpn. Got a special account for $10/year. Can't really selfhost vpn on 100+ location with $10.

Proton services
https://proton.me/

PIA 3 years for like 80$

Seedbox for, I dont even know

and icloud for a dollar a month

I self host vaultwarden but I also pay teh $10/year to support the project, I self host for Collections and I use the paid bitwarden at work since they do not allow ddns addresses in our network.

AirVPN but if you don't need port forwarding Mullvad is king.

Bitwarden for passwords
MXRoute for mail
Kagi for search
Backblaze B2 for offsite backups

I self host pi-hole, but I send them some money once in a while.

Honestly, standard web hosting is far and away cheaper to outsource.

I pay Ionos $14 a month for unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth to host an unlimited amount of sites. It easier to let them handle the hosting and just redirect the sub-domains I need to my home server.

Most Redditor's here in r/selfhosted have likely never felt the slashdot effect, and the havoc it creates. I've had two big posts hit Reddit frontpage over the years linking to my website, and Ionos handled 100k daily unique visitors without a hiccup. No Pi4 on AT&T home fiber could handle that.

Edit: Whoops, missed the under $30 qualifier, Still leaving this here though.

Cloudflare + VPS

Cloudflare (custom domain)

NextDNS

Zoho mail (you@customdomain.com)

Proton mail

HA cloud. Apple iCloud storage.

Pushover. One time payment that covers lifetime push messages.

Real-debrid and bitwarden, both are amazing and dirt cheap

1password, best $36 spent. I also pay for YT premium.

Backblaze b2 backup. I'm backing up almost 500gb of personal data (compressed and only things I can't get back easy) for less than $2\month.

I don’t know how many times I have to say this: selfhosting is about more than saving money.

In other words, sometimes paying for a service you could selfhost is the right call. In most cases, if you can manage a self-hosting setup, your time is worth more than the cost of cloud services. TBH, I do it for data governance reasons more than cost.

It’s not either/or and it’s not about going “off-grid” for a lot of people.

Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, anyone?)

I mean I get that's a strange mention here, but with the value I've got from it (like being able to reference content of some website *in point of time* knowing it may change or even completely die) I somehow feel obligated to send at least a few tens of dollars per year. Also they have matching donations campaign around Christmas (at least that's how it was in recent years), so it's a nice idea donate right then.

I supported Bitwarden for at least 5 years, and like you.... walked over the $10/year bridge. I setup my own Vaultwarden about 2 weeks ago with off-site backups... I'm fine with this responsibility, but I waved goodbye to them.

I continue to support Proton (now Business) for custom domain e-mail & VPN. They don't offer port forwarding, so I still support AirVPN for personal reasons. I tried out WireShark & was not impressed with latency/packet loss monitoring at their nearby endpoints.

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I support BackBlaze B2 for all off-site backups -- excellent low-cost provider for my "Cloud" backups.

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I run Home Assistant locally, but I'd definitely support their Cloud project if I needed a greater home acceptance factor... very similar to supporting Proton & Bitwarden in their beginnings. I appreciate them not paywalling features.

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I ran away from Blue Iris Surveillance & adopted Frigate about 6 months ago -- best decision I ever made. I love running Frigate with a GPU for AI.

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If you waved a magic wand around 8-10 years ago & told everyone they'd be drowning in smartphone photos & privacy issues with Google, 9/10 would not have believed you. That's about when I left Google Drive permanently back then & have been running Nextcloud since. I am glad to see masses of people finally leaving Google Photos. I also run PhotoPrism as my long-term photo manager to visualize "life" for our family. Absolutely zero money flowing into the hands of Google now. They tossed their Google Domains Beta idea into the trash can of another entity I accidentally supported earlier in life -- SquareSpace. When Google announced the sale of Google Domains to SquareSpace, I moved all domains to CloudFlare within a week. Thanks SquareSpace, but I can run my own Ghost & Jekyll blogs for free now thanks to this great OSS community.

Why not just self host Bitwarden, or Vaultwarden?

Pushover

I only pay for iCloud+ for mail

Not vps but adjacent: I have a Dreamhost storage account to sync my Joplin notes. It's so very very smol it barely costs anything. The notes are E2EE with a key I own.

Unsure if this classifies as cheap but:

• BitWarden
• AnonAddy - I use the extension and create an email for every website. Wish I knew this years ago.
• Proton Unlimited for email and VPN
• YouTube Premium - I watch a lot of YT and this is a great use of money. YT Music has also great radio station generation, in fact I think better than Spotify and Apple Music in my experience.
• Apple Music for the car and less less/Atmos audio. It’s lovely in the living room.

Bitwarden.. for me its for 2 reasons. One I dont have to deal with keeping something that needs to be super secure up to date. and 2 it help continue the project and its 10 bucks. I spend more then that one dumber stuff.