I added up what I was paying a managed provider to run a few low-traffic personal services and felt slightly ill. Not because it was a fortune, but because the things costing the most were the ones doing almost nothing: a wiki I read once a week, a feed reader, a couple of little APIs that exist purely for my own convenience. They were paying rent for the privilege of idling.
So they came home. The box was already there, already on, already running other bits and pieces. Moving a container from a hosted platform to a machine under my desk is not glamorous work. It is docker compose files, a reverse proxy, and a Tailscale interface so I can still reach things from a coffee shop without exposing them to the whole internet. The migration itself took an evening, most of which was untangling environment variables I'd set eighteen months ago and entirely forgotten the reasoning behind.
What I deliberately did not bring home: anything where being down at 03:00 actually matters, and anything holding the only copy of something I'd cry to lose. Email stays rented. Off-site backups stay rented. The point was never to self-host out of principle until it hurts. It was to stop paying cloud margins on workloads that genuinely do not care where they run.
The honest trade is that I've swapped a monthly bill for my own attention. When the home box reboots after a power cut I'm the one bringing things back up. That's fine. For services whose worst-case failure is "John's feed reader is down for an hour", it's an entirely reasonable deal.