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.