Self-Hosting Is Not Free: Accounting for Your Own Time

Wed, 27 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

We love to tell ourselves a story about self-hosting: cancel the £10/month subscription, run the open-source equivalent at home, and pocket the difference. It’s a satisfying story. It’s also, in cold accounting terms, frequently nonsense — because the one cost we never put on the spreadsheet is the most expensive one we own. Our own time.

I’m not writing this to talk you out of self-hosting. I host more than is sensible, and I’d do it again. But I’ve watched too many people justify a setup on pure financial grounds, then quietly spend forty hours a year keeping it alive while telling themselves they “saved money”. Let’s be honest about the ledger.

Time - Tag - vo.rs

Self-Hosting Is Not Free: Accounting for Your Own Time