@alexglow I pay about €5 a month to Hetzner for their NX11 product for photo and file storage. The Nextcloud install is managed by them, and they communicate pretty well on upgrades etc.

I sync my phone's photos there. Nextcloud tries to be a shared workspace like Google's suite with office software, etc, but I don't use any of those aspects. There are a ton of Nextcloud applications you can install, but I'm really mostly just using it for the file storage / sync.

@alexglow I run Nextcloud in EC2 for storage-- costs me about the same as Dropbox would, maybe a little less. It has a ton of collaboration and office features I don't really use (I just want a folder that can sync everywhere), and is pretty low-maintenance as self-hosted stuff goes.

For notes I've been using Joplin, which you can have sync'd up with Nextcloud. I feel like I'd be getting more if I used Obsidian but the last time I looked (quite a while ago) Obsidian had some dark patterns against third-party sync solutions

@alexglow I used simplenote for notes, it seems like the developers are decent but they are based in California.

Mega.io for cloud storage, it's based in new Zealand

Tuta is a great private email provider, I've been using them for years and really like it