I Replaced $2,400 in Subscriptions With 5 Free Apps

I did the math on what I was paying for last quarter and the number was $2,387.92 per year, paid in monthly chunks small enough that I never questioned any of them. That is two months of rent in some cities, gone, for software I could run on hardware I already owned. So I spent a weekend replacing the worst offenders with self-hosted alternatives, and what I learned was this: the migration took longer than I expected, the savings are real, and three of the five replacements are not going anywhere.

This is not a “ditch all your subscriptions” post. Some subscriptions are worth the money. The point of this article is to show the categories where self-hosting wins, the categories where it does not, and the actual cost, in time, of running the things yourself.

What I was paying for

Here is the bill I am most embarrassed about, broken into the parts that mattered:

• Streaming bundle. Three services, total around $47/month. I watched maybe 6 hours of content per month across all of them.
• Cloud storage and photos. Two services, $14.98/month combined, for about 380 GB of family photos and the same 380 GB of files I had already on a hard drive.
• Password manager. $3.99/month for a family plan. The free tier was enough for me, and I was paying for the kids I do not have.
• Email forwarding / catch-all. A vanity domain, $4/month, for a single email address I check once a week.
• VPN. $9.99/month, because I had a habit from 2018 that I never revisited.

Add it up. Most months I was not even using all of these at the level I was paying for. The streaming was the worst offender. The VPN was the easiest to kill.

The five replacements, in order of how much they saved me

1. Jellyfin replaced three streaming services

I had a Plex Pass I bought eight years ago, and I keep it because the lifetime fee is long since amortized. But for the rest of you, Jellyfin (a free media server you run on your own hardware) is the answer. I installed it on a small N100 mini PC (a low-power x86 box that costs about $120 new and sips 10 to 15 watts under load) I had sitting in a drawer, pointed it at the external drive with my movies, and let it transcode (convert video formats on the fly) for the TVs in the house. Setup took about 90 minutes including the time to organize the library metadata.

The catch: I still had to source the media. Jellyfin is a player and a library, not a content service. If you stop paying for Netflix, you also stop getting Netflix. What Jellyfin replaces is the “I have already paid for this content via disc, vinyl, or a one-time digital purchase” use case, and for that case it is perfect.

What it cost me in time: a weekend. What it saved me: about $360 per year on streaming, once I let two of the three subscriptions lapse.

2. Nextcloud replaced Google Drive, Dropbox, and Google Photos

Nextcloud (a self-hosted file sync and photo app that talks the same protocols as major cloud storage services) is the heaviest hitter on this list. It is also the one that takes the most time to get right. I run it on the same mini PC, with a 4 TB USB drive attached and a second drive for nightly backups. The whole stack is behind a reverse proxy (a small web server in front of Nextcloud that handles HTTPS and routing) and a Cloudflare Tunnel (a free service that exposes your server to the internet without opening router ports), so I never had to mess with port forwarding.

The setup that took real time was not Nextcloud itself, it was the photo sync. The official iOS app works, but the Android app is better. The killer feature is the Memories app, which gives you a Google Photos-style timeline view and face recognition. Once that is working, you do not miss Google Photos at all.

What it cost me: a full weekend and about $200 in drives. What it saved me: roughly $180 per year on cloud storage, with the bonus of owning my photos instead of licensing them from a company that scans them for AI training.

3. Vaultwarden replaced my password manager

Vaultwarden is a community build of the Bitwarden server (an open-source password manager with a paid hosted version). It is a single Docker container (a packaged application that runs isolated from the rest of your system), and it took me 15 minutes to set up, including HTTPS. The clients, the browser extension, the iOS app, the Android app, all of them work without modification because the official Bitwarden clients talk to any server that speaks the right protocol.

Why I did not just use the free tier: the free Bitwarden tier is fine, and if you are reading this and you are not on a password manager yet, go set up the free tier today. The reason I self-host is that I am a control freak about credentials, and I like the option of running my own backup routines.

What it cost me: 15 minutes. What it saved me: $47.88 per year.

4. SimpleLogin replaced my email-forwarding bill

SimpleLogin was acquired by Proton, and the free tier still exists but is limited. The community alternative is something like mailcow (a self-hosted mail server suite), but for what I needed, a $4/month catch-all forwarding service, the self-hosting math did not work. What I did instead was point my vanity domain at a $1/month mailbox at a small hosting provider, and use mail forwarding rules there.

I am not going to pretend this is the win the others were. The actual savings here are small. But the lesson is: some subscriptions are not worth replacing, only renegotiating.

What it cost me: 30 minutes. What it saved me: $36 per year.

5. WireGuard replaced the VPN

This was the easiest one. I already had a server with a public IP. WireGuard is a modern VPN protocol built into the Linux kernel. Setup was 20 minutes, including the client config files for my phone and laptop. There is no monthly fee, no logging, no marketing emails, and the throughput is better than any commercial VPN I have used.

If you do not have a server with a public IP, this is not as easy. The good news is that the cheapest VPS (virtual private server, a small cloud computer you rent by the month) from a provider like Hetzner or BuyVM (about $3 to $4 per month) will host WireGuard fine, and you still come out ahead of the $9.99/month consumer VPNs.

What it cost me: 20 minutes. What it saved me: $119.88 per year.

What the migration actually looked like

The total time, start to finish, was a long weekend plus a couple of evenings the following week. The longest single task was Nextcloud, because I kept adding things (photo sync, calendar, contacts). The shortest were WireGuard and Vaultwarden, because they are one-container apps with good docs.

The things that surprised me:

• Backups matter more than uptime. I had one disk failure six months in. I would have lost everything if I had not set up the second drive from the start.
• Cloudflare Tunnel changed the threat model. I never had to open a port on my router, and I never had to think about dynamic DNS (a way to reach a home server when your ISP changes your IP).
• Updates are not optional. Every package I run, I update weekly. Most self-hosted compromises start with an unpatched app.

Trade-offs

Self-hosting is not free in time. Backups have to be tested, drives have to be replaced, the occasional container refuses to update and you spend 90 minutes reading forum threads. In our case, the time cost is about 2 hours per month of actual hands-on work, mostly updates and a quarterly test-restore. If you do not enjoy that kind of work at all, the math changes fast.

The migration took a long weekend, plus a few follow-up evenings. The hardest single thing was the Nextcloud photo sync, because the iOS app is finicky about background uploads. The easiest was WireGuard, because the kernel module just works.

If you are technically curious and you already have a spare machine, this is a clear win. If the words “Docker” and “reverse proxy” make you want to close the tab, look at managed self-hosting services like Umbrel, YunoHost, or the new generation of “home cloud” boxes. They hide the worst of it.

What I would tell past me

• Do the math first. Add up what you actually pay per year. The number will be larger than you think.
• Start with the easy wins. WireGuard and Vaultwarden are 30 minutes each and have no gotchas.
• Test your backups before you delete the cloud copies. A backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a backup.
• Pick a weekend with no other plans. The Nextcloud setup will eat the whole thing, and you do not want to be doing it in 90-minute chunks between errands.
• Do not try to replace everything at once. Pick two or three categories, get them solid, and add more later.

Bottom line: $2,400 a year is the kind of money that changes a small business’s runway or a family’s vacation budget. Self-hosting is not for everyone, but the categories where it works well, file sync, passwords, media, and VPN, are the categories where most people are overpaying. Spend a weekend on the easy ones. See how it feels. Then decide if you want to go further.