Selfhosting costs: in hardware you run your services, hardware for backups and most importantly in your own time. In most cases, over time it will be cheaper then paying a lot of subscriptions monthly, but there is also a tradoff - you are the responsible one for your data, backup, availability... And like in the matrix blue and red pill scenario, a lot of people would choose ignorance, even though there are a lot of evidence of:
- companies loosing data using using private data for their own purposes, resselign private data. It's never been more obvious then in current AI age (protect data in AI AGE).
It's mostly about trust. Building trust with a company/service tahes a lot of time and a lot of users, but when choosing a selfhosted open-source solution you can literlay look under-the hood (the code), design pricipals, architecture etc. and decide if the solution and the creators have yoir trust.
Selfhosting forces you to be responsible for your own backups. There are a lot of stories about users of cloud services beeing let down by their provider - lost their data (just google: google data deleted) and learning the hard way that the best responsibility is in your own hands (and not other you don't know and don't care about you).
Controling your own services can be compared to the entreprenur mindset - you want tp be in charge of future, business, and you accept all tradeofss of that.
I need to be in control of my private data. Just the thought that my hard work (blogpost, note, document, photo) or my business critical data is dependend on some other company, that can change their terms, go bancrupt, or just don't care for my data - i just could not stand it.
Building your own homelab is a great discovery road for business - a lot of solutions, tools I use at my homelab and home network end up beeing implemented either at my business or our partners/clients.
I higly value privacy. Enve if i trust a business with my private data beeing dependend on the fact that:
- their business needs to grow - thus even if gathering anonimized data to determine how should they expand, iterate
- beeing a business with thouseds or milions of customers, they are constantly bombarded with hacking attempts and the chance of my data beeing exposed is far more probable then those beeing selfhosted.
Beeing in the security landscape for longer almost two decades and building security products - I'm absolutly sure that if someone would like to hack me and expose my data it would be the matter of when - not if. But still, typical data exposing is a byproduct of larger hacks, breaching company and gathering data of milions of users - and not a specific person as a target.
It's much easier to use a selfhosted product and migrate to a different solution if you own the data. There are a lot of services that do not offer data export, API and it's often impossible to migrate if you want to switch.