I spent Sunday moving four small services off a cloud VM and back onto a mini PC under the stairs. Nothing heavy: a feed reader, a bookmarks thing, a wiki, a little metrics dashboard. The sort of stuff that has maybe one user, me, and was costing more in monthly rent than it had any right to.
The trigger was boring, which is how these things usually go. The VM needed an OS upgrade, the upgrade meant an afternoon of yak-shaving, and somewhere in the middle I realised I was about to spend real effort maintaining a machine I didn't need to be paying for. The box at home has spare cores doing nothing. The latency to it from my sofa is, generously, zero.
So: Docker Compose files moved over more or less verbatim, a small Tailscale network so I can still reach them from a train, and Caddy out front doing TLS without me thinking about it. The only genuinely fiddly part was data, copying the volumes across and convincing myself the backups still ran afterwards. They do, off-site, because a homelab without backups is just a slower way to lose things.
I'm not making a grand argument here. Plenty belongs in the cloud, the stuff that needs to be up when my house loses power doesn't live under the stairs. But these particular services are low-stakes, single-user, and mine, and there's a quiet satisfaction in them running on hardware I can actually touch. The bill went down and the fun went up, which is a rare combination.