Why I self-host everything

The whole thing runs on a single €4/month VPS. Three web apps, three microservices, a Firestore connection, an nginx reverse proxy, Let's Encrypt for TLS, PM2 for process management, GitHub Actions for CI/CD.

What it costs to run "real" workloads

Compare it to the cloud-shaped equivalent on AWS or GCP:

• Three Cloud Run services: ~$15/mo idle, more under load
• Cloud Load Balancer: $18/mo just to exist
• Cloud Build minutes: ~$0.003/min × deploys
• Egress: $0.12/GB after the free tier
• Managed certs: free (one of the few)

You'd be at $40-60/mo before you served a single real user. The VPS does the same workload for €4.

What you trade

Self-hosting means you eat the operations:

• TLS renewals (certbot handles it, but you set it up)
• Process supervision (PM2)
• Log rotation
• Backup discipline
• Patches and updates
• "Why is the disk full" at 11pm

But here's the thing — that operations work is the job. Doing it on my own infrastructure is how I keep the muscles current. When I started outsourcing all of this to managed services at work, I felt my instincts atrophying.

When self-hosting stops making sense

For a startup with paying customers, the calculus flips. Engineering time costs more than cloud bills, and "the service was down because nginx ran out of file descriptors" is not a story you want to tell your investors.

But for a personal project, a portfolio, a learning lab? Self-host. The €4 buys you something the cloud literally cannot: practice.