Been wanting to start try nextcloudpi[0] but I need the time to learn and set it up (even if it's an hour of reading). My point is for someone not as willing to learn as me, it's at least harder than signing up for OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

[0] https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/

I've been thinking of getting a Nextcloud instance at Hetzner maybe. It's fairly easy, and managed.

It's the software support and maintenance that's hard. Replacement apps and configuration. Especially if you want to do email...

You can't really do e-mail from home anyway, unless you get some tunnel to a fixed IP address that can build trust.

But it's possible to run all kinds of other stuff, if you know how. All kinds of scratch your itch apps, monitoring, backup, small web apps, file sharing, audio server, seedbox, databases, etc. Stuff you'd not find a service for, because it violates copyright when it's not done for personal use, etc.

It's especially useful if there are multiple people in the household.

Most of what you list are or can be one-time costs. And most of it can be automated in a run-a-script, check for errors and forget about it in 1 minute, or deal with some failure in 15minutes.

The main benefit of running your own is that there are almost no ongoing costs. Lot's of the SaaS prices are really overblown, so running your own is appealing there.

And people spend time and stress on dealing with SaaS issues too from time to time, so it's not like you just pay and use without any additional costs.

It just needs a serious consideration.

Also running your own can be fun/fulfilling in its own way, because you now have more control and you're allowed more creativity. For some people that may ba a benefit too.

I picked up a Synology, it has replacement apps for photos (the big one) and others. Super easy, and it'll run docker images.