I am trying to capture costs for starting into homelab/selfhosting.
VPNs, search engines, absolutely everything and anything.
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I pay ~$15/mo for Usenet so I can get…news…easily… 👀
First rule of Usenet…
I like getting my news delivered quickly without weird limitations.
Since you are paying, it seems to be worth it. I read a lot of mixed opinions online. What do you find there that you can’t on torrent sites? Or is it just ease of use?
Ease of use (once it’s set up). Getting it set up is the tricky part, but it’s just tedious more than anything else.
I actually have two subscriptions, one for the newsgroup and one for the indexer. The newsgroup access is monthly while the indexer is annual, like $12/yr or something, stupid cheap.
Absolutely worth it.
Domain is about $15/yr
Email for my domain is $20/yr
VPN is about $50/yr
Yeah thats… Pretty much it for me.
Unless we want to include donations? But that doesnt fit the word “subscription” IMO.
For a stretch, subscription should include every rent seeking expenses(not specifically for homelabbing); house rent, water, electricity, gas, phone, internet, monthly bus pass etc etc
Oh most of those I go pay as you go. Instead of a bus pass I cycle and pay for new bikes as required.
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
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’m pretty sure they do support catch all, because that’s what I have. Or at least they used to and I’m grandfathered in.
looked it up, seems like a quick setting:
I’m pretty sure I have the cheapest, one email address option with catch-all. I didn’t set up any aliases.
Ooh, thanks for this. Yeah, I got confused by the pricing page
When marketing is directed towards normies and not nerds.
There are subscription costs for homelabbing?
Electricity. Off-site backup. FOSS project donations. Thigh-high socks. Domains.
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.
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
Im good at the economy. If you turn off the electricity you have an extra $300 for your Thigh-high socks
I hear of VPS and VPN, then there is domains and loads I dont know about.
and here I thought the idea was to avoid to have subscriptions 🤣
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.
For me, it was more the quality of search than privacy concerns. The latter I could mitigate, as you wrote.
But, oh man, the search quality on Kagi is so much better than everywhere else. The ability to just outright block domains in results, chef’s kiss.
Well, I’ll certainly keep it in the back of my head.
If you’re interested, try something like searxng and route it through a VPN or vps.
I do run a Searxng private instance and love it.
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.
Cant you just install a VPN profile on your wife’s phone? Like companies do
Can, but there are issues. As you travel and change towers, that vpn connection has to tear down and be rebuilt on the next IP. Towers are only a couple miles apart best case so at 60, any realtime ip communication gets bad. She doesn’t love running the client full time and just wants to see the ip cameras.
The real solution would be simply stand up an haproxy with https and require a specific certificate to communicate. which i can do… but why when i’d just want to donate to home assistant anyway.
Your last paragraph is explanation enough I agree. But tbh the phone tower thing sounds like an edge case. Yes, if your wife is watching the live feed of the cameras and is sitting on a highspeed train it will happen but that doesn’t sound like a very likely scenario to me. Although I probably underestimate the times you are actually moving while checking the cameras. Cuz idle time on transportation is a good time to do that. Anyways thanks for keeping the lights in the Casa turned on.
But tbh the phone tower thing sounds like an edge case.
The vpn drops and renegotiates, if you’re on a facetime, if you’re on a meet, if you’re listening to streaming radio.
Just domain for $11 a year.
The home server is running on old laptop so I guess slight electricity too. ISP doesn’t really count since I work from home and need to pay for that anyway.
I have lifetime Windscribe VPN and Koofr 1TB, which are not subscriptions.
0
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol ISP Internet Service Provider RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #319 for this comm, first seen 27th May 2026, 20:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
- 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.
Aside from domain costs, I don’t pay for any extra services in regards to my homelab. I pay for email as well because I don’t want to manage that.
Yearly:
- ~80€ for 6 domains (using all of them)
- 125€ electricity (480kWh, 0,26€/kWh)
- 540€ VPSes (joint projects where other admins have access, not entirely paid by myself though, still planning to migrate one of them into homelab)
Not counting ISP since we have that anyways.
What are you using those 6 domains for? Genuine question btw
I have also like quite some domains.
One just firstnamelastname to have it
One for homelabbing
One for business
One, because I thought firstname@lastname.email was a cool idea. Now all my accounts run through it and I cannot change it anymore :/
One for my old startup, where I just like the name to much
One for another old business, but my mailserver runs through that domain, and it is too much of a bother to change that 😅
So, remember folks: don’t buy too many domains, it becomes a liability.
0.26€/kWh? Jeez I thought $0.14 CAD during peak was bad
Yeah it’s like that in Europe. Part of it is covered by my mini photovoltaic (600Wp), but that’s not enough.
VPNs, search engines, absolutely everything and anything.
WiresharkWireguard (VPN): free- SearxNG (Search Engine): free
- Equipment: widely varies
The whole idea of selfhosting is to cut out corporate subscriptions and to retain your privacy, security, anonymity, and data.
Wireshark has to be a typo right? I never knew the packet capture program did that.
Ahhh fuck Wireguard. This old brain is not functioning today.
To be fair, Wireshark is a far more memorable name than Wireguard. Sharks are very cool!
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.
Torrent cache? As in seedbox?
Usenet…boy that brings back some memories from back in the day. Surprised that it seems to still be going strong.
Yarrr! But it really mostly is Yarr these days. So don’t go firing up Trumpet winsock to check Forte Agent :)
Things just seemed…simpler back then.
They were, I think. Or we were just younger.
Ahh yeah. Good ol winaock. DLL. Just copy the DLL and magically these programs are connected???
I remember it being a touch more …analog…back in the day. ATDT commands and all.
But yeah, Win 3.11+ trumpet winsock and Free Agent were the shit. Rec.martial.arts was home back then (along with mIRC).
Lemmy reminds me a bit of the old Usenet fora.
People still hang on IRC :). Shoot people still use mIRC among other venerable clients.
$50/year electrical bill for a Pi?!
Nevermind, I just did some back of the napkin math and came out around 35 a year if I was running one full power 24/7, so yeah, that is the right ballpark guess for a maximum.
Yeah, same. Though at 3-5W … it really is just a very rough guess. Lemme ShitGPT it. Oh, I was way off
A realistic Pi 4B-only estimate is about A$8–A$12 per year in electricity, assuming it is on 24/7 and used for Jellyfin streaming around 10–12 hours per week.
Pi 4B measurements are typically around 2.7–2.85 W at idle, about 5.1 W under moderate server load, and around 6.4 W under full CPU stress. Using Perth/WA’s Synergy Home Plan A1 energy charge of 32.3719 c/kWh, excluding the daily supply charge, that works out very cheaply because the device uses only about 25–36 kWh/year.
Scenario Assumed usage Annual energy Approx. annual cost
Mostly idle 3 W 24/7 26.3 kWh A$8.51/year Idle + 12h/wk Jellyfin 2.7 W idle, 5.1 W streaming 25.1 kWh A$8.14/year Heavier Jellyfin/server use 2.7 W idle, 6.4 W streaming 26.0 kWh A$8.40/year Conservative wall-power estimate 4 W idle, 6.4 W streaming 36.5 kWh A$11.83/year
The bigger swing factor is storage, not the Pi. A USB SSD adds very little; a USB-powered 2.5" hard drive might add a few dollars per year; a powered 3.5" external drive left spinning 24/7 could push the total more into the A$15–A$30/year range.
So, for the Raspberry Pi 4B itself as a Jellyfin box: roughly A$10/year is a good mental estimate.
A realistic Pi 4B-only estimate is about A$8–A$12 per year in electricity
That’s about what I calculated for my locale. Roughly $0.30–$0.85 per month, around $0.48/month at 4 W. Which is remarkable especially given what you can run on one.
Agree. I know the Pi’s are out of favour these days…but they are a cool little machine. I got mine running DietPi and a bunch o crap (the usuals - JF, arr stack, pi hole, syncthing, yadda yadda) and running headless the footprint (power and memory wise) is tiny.
I joked about the 4xAA batteries thing but iirc, there is actually a Pi-HAT that creates a micro UPS that’ll run the pi for maybe three to five hours just on double A batteries.
Edit: yep
https://pimodules.com/product/ups-pico-hv4-0-advanced
or more sensibly
I’ve got a drawer full of various models I’ve picked up here and there, mostly used that people were selling. I stumbled across a yard sale once where a guy and his son were selling a lot of computer equipment to raise money for his son to get some newer stuff for college. There was a whole box of them, maybe 10+ and I paid $100 for all of them. I use them from time to time for different projects. Good little learning boards.
This is why torrents are better! I torrent the highest quality files I can find so I’d blow through that 500gb quickly.
Debatable :) Torrents rely on seeders. I’ve downloaded movies and TV shows >5 yrs since initial upload via Usenet. Yes, things expire there too (eventually), but when the getting is good, it’s uniformly good / fast.
OTOH, 1337 has been pretty decent to me of late.
It’s tricky. On one hand, Jellyfin and the arr stack are what got me into self hosting. OTOH…torrents are simpler - I can plug my external SSD directly into my router, which streams to NovaPlayer on any android device - nothing else needed. Want a new show / movie? Grab the torrent, punt it across to ssd via samba share. It auto populates.
https://github.com/nova-video-player/aos-AVP
It’s…simpler. Arguably more elegant / less moving parts.
Dunno.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i’m on two private trackers that aren’t that hard to get into and I routinely download 10 plus year old 50 - 100 gb files with good seeds. I have never run into something not decently seeded since I went private.
Would love to hear about these trackers too!
Only a VPN at around $65-70 per year.
What!! Unless your VPN is hooked up through a NASA telescope and transmits your data through space and time 70 bucks per year is a SCAMMM!!! $70 every two/three years, that makes more sense.
Depends on the currency and features. If you’re looking for something outside of the 14 eyes that allows port forwarding, your options are extremely limited.
I live in the deep South and don’t want my information out there. Mullvad has done me right for years, I see no reason to change. Many other VPN’s are vulnerable and can leak your information to your ISP.
Rip I forgot mullvad was 5/month which is in the area that they are paying 💀
The only subscription I have is Mullvad.
Any issues torrenting?
I usually rip from illegal Turkish streaming sites, so torrenting is unnecessary and harder. yt-dlp and videodownloader is usually enough.
