LucidLynxHold on to Your Hardware
The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's
servers.
Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of
managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None
of this requires expensive hardware, it just requires caring enough to set it up
You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long run.
So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could easily be your time spent with friend or family.
This point is oversold.
Sure - self hosting takes a bit more work. It usually pays for itself in saved costs (ex - if you weren't doing this work, you're paying money which you needed to do work for to have it done for you.)
Cloud costs haven't actually gotten much cheaper (but the base hardware HAS - even now during these inflated costs), and now every bit of software tries to bill you monthly.
Further, if you're not putting services open on the web - you actually don't need to update all that often. Especially not the services themselves.
Honestly - part of the benefit of self-hosting is that I can choose whether I really want to make that update to latest, and whether the features matter to me. Often... they don't.
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Consider: Most people are running outdated IP provided routers with known vulnerabilities that haven't been updated in literally years. They do ok.