I spent a couple of evenings this month migrating a handful of services off a VPS and back onto a box in the cupboard. Nothing dramatic, no manifesto about the cloud, just a quiet recognition that I was paying a monthly fee to run things that idle most of the day on hardware I already own.
The candidates were the easy ones: a small Postgres instance, a couple of internal web apps nobody outside the house touches, and the bits of monitoring that watch the monitoring. None of it needs public reachability, which removes the strongest argument for keeping it rented. A WireGuard tunnel handles the few times I want at it from elsewhere.
The honest trade is that I've swapped a predictable bill for my own time and my own electricity. When the VPS hardware failed it was someone else's problem at three in the morning. Now it's mine. I've made my peace with that by keeping backups offsite and accepting that "internal services" can tolerate an hour of downtime while I find a spare disk.
What I kept in the cloud is anything that needs to be up when my house power isn't, which is to say email and DNS and the public-facing things. That division feels right. Run the boring internal stuff where it's cheap, rent the things that genuinely benefit from someone else's uptime. The cupboard hums a little louder now, and the bill is smaller, and I sleep fine.