People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.

This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.

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swed420 a day ago | parent | next [-]

What you call a commitment, many call a hobby / learning / refreshening opportunity.

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a day ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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altmanaltman a day ago | parent | prev [-]

yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does become a chore over time and there is always a cost. You can justify it by saying you are getting value out of it but in my experience, this is true for every activity. Everyone has limited time and spending it importantly is important to me.

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nickthegreek a day ago | parent | next [-]

Good news, my coding agents can access my proxmox and HA and immich and make having a homelab easier than it ever has been. I actually just used codex to help me find dupes across multiple user libraries in immich and quarantine them. In immich, I can only dedupe across a single user library. I used codex to find grid based images that I needed to convert into animated images from back in my iphone 4 days. It located the images, wrote software to convert to webp and handled it.

Codex reviewed my immich setup and recommended I change things the clip model, came up with a better backup strat and found holes in my system.

My codex will ADB into my NVIDIA Shield and proxmox and setup accounts, install packages, create Home Assistant integrations to tie it all together. As a hobbyist, these are things that I would never even think about taking on.

I bought a hdmi-cec controller for my projector last week. Firmware didnt work with the PX3-pro, but it was tied to my ESPHome. Codex diagnosed the issue, rewrote, tested and uploaded the firmware OTA. All done from my phone while I was waiting in line at a store.

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swed420 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> yes but there is still an opportunity cost

I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs

> a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks

This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.

Other benefits not mentioned include not signing your data or life away to whatever Google's lawyers or marketers have decided is best for them, contributing to FLOSS even if only as an end user, not being a victim of rug-pulls...the list goes on.

Obviously this isn't for everybody, because there's no denying it takes time. The point is that for many, this is a very easy tradeoff to make when factoring in all of the other benefits.

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buran77 a day ago | parent [-]

> I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs

This is mostly wording. It is a commitment, it has an opportunity cost, there are tradeoffs.

> This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.

So many opportunities but the day is still 24 hours long. You still have to choose your opportunities wisely, and give up something else in the process. And if you look at the big picture those who choose to take this opportunity are not so many compared to those who just pay with data so they don't have to pay with time and effort. Everyone pays money in the end.

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dingaling a day ago | parent | next [-]

> You still have to choose your opportunities wisely

It's odd that you've gone off on this as opposed to people who spend their 'opportunity time' on Netflix, Call of Duty or D&D.

Sysadmin is a hobby I enjoy and I don't consider it lost time, or wasted opportunity, when so many of my colleagues go out getting drunk or watch football.

	▲	buran77 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It's odd that you've gone off on this "Gone off on this"? Wait till you see me go off on people with a lack of reading comprehension, a pathological persecution complex, and a giant chip on their shoulder. Anyway, if you ask your parents to explain my comment to you, they'll probably immediately tell you that it's a generic comment on the inability to take up every opportunity all the time. You choose one thing, others choose another, everyone does their own math (you should probably ask someone to do your math for you). I don't care about your hobby which is why I didn't mention "sysadmin", "Netflix", "Call of Duty" or "D&D", nor did I say which one I consider "better" or "worthwhile". Just that you can't do them all.

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swed420 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This is mostly wording

Right, but the distinction is relevant in the context of the original claim:

> People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend

My point was that many of us do account for this time in the aforementioned ways.

Plus, once it's set up, it practically runs itself if you have a sane backup methodology and are only running upgrades every couple months.

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rc5150 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If you have to jump through this set of hoops to come to the conclusion that you want to outsource the effort of self-admin, just save the trouble and deal with not being the target audience.

	▲	buran77 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Was it a full moon or what's with the dick attitude? It's a few sentences that basically say "you can't have all the hobbies, some people choose something else, everyone pays with whatever they can afford". What's the point of your reply other than the attempted jab at the end? > jump through this set of hoops And a weak jab that was for someone who's overwhelmed from trying to parse a couple of sentences. If you thought it's objectively wrong you would have already pointed that out loudly and offensively. So you just took the opportunity to feel like a big boy and tell me "this admin stuff is not for you". Good for you big boy, glad you got that out of the system. Of course, you also outsource the effort for almost everything around you (even your reading comprehension), to someone else - an expert, the person you're talking to, or your parents. But you can download a compose file and import it in what's probably a NAS with a nice "import" GUI so welcome to the "target audience". I'm a big boy too, you see, one with actual reading comprehension ;).

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Dylan16807 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much.

And I happily used a Google pro subscription for a while. Even when they doubled the price. Then they started actually limiting it to 5TB and it wasn't worth it.

I guarantee you I am saving boatloads compared to the $100/month tier I'd need for all my data. That pays off my entire hardware budget in under a year and the time I spent is worth a fraction of that.

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QuiEgo 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The value of the homelab for me is things I can’t pay money to get any other way. I would never recommend it for just replacing cloud storage, ROI is not good.

There’s nothing as nice as Plex for consuming media IMHO, and home assistant/homebridge glue a pile of cheap IoT stuff into a single, cohesive, useable setup.

I am a reluctant admin. I resent spending time on it. It feels like work, which after 10 hours of doing similar things for much better pay grinds on you. Luckily it doesn’t take much time to keep it going after the initial setup.

Thread and Matter give me hope one day the IoT stuff might be okay. I have no hope I will ever be able to get the single media portal any other way.

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ishtanbul a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.

	▲	spl757 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I run all my own stuff local-first, but I am also a systems and networking engineer and understand all of the concepts so I can build it properly. It takes time, and the willingness to do so. If you don't already have the knowledge to set things like this up, and are really doing it to save money as a consumer, then Google Photos as a product is more of a fit and the user will definitely have a better experience. For someone like me, it's easy and quick and I have a very robust incremental backup system with air-gapped copies. So it does save me money, because it only takes my time and knowledge. There is no absolute answer, because it's subjective depending on the needs of the user.

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tripleee a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright

	▲	semi-extrinsic a day ago \| parent [-]
		Depends heavily on the software cost and how far from core competency it is. If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY. If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it. Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.

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bs7280 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.

Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.

Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.

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altmanaltman a day ago | parent [-]

yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.

And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately

	▲	drdexebtjl a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		OSS lets you take your time. For example, paperless-ngx was already an absolute ball of mud, and now there’s a new major version that’s somehow even worse. I’m just not upgrading. It’s behind a VPN, I control what files it can ingest, so it’s okay if it’s old. I’m looking at a few alternatives and I’ll switch when they are mature and when I have the time, but there’s essentially no deadline.
	▲	bs7280 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It definitely can, but Its easier than ever to fork an older version and modify with claude, or just switch to a different OSS provider. With commercial tools there's no rolling back. In fact, I would pay money to go back to the pre Allen Dye liquid ass IOS update.

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Banditoz a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, once it's set up the maintenance cost is minimal. Cron'd backups and such and you won't have to worry.

	▲	altmanaltman a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms