I am trying to capture costs for starting into homelab/selfhosting.
VPNs, search engines, absolutely everything and anything.
I am trying to capture costs for starting into homelab/selfhosting.
VPNs, search engines, absolutely everything and anything.
Hosting for two:
I just upgraded my home storage setup, so offsite backup is now running at my parents house, saving me ~$250/yr (but probably costing them ~$50/yr in added utility costs)
I understand the concept, free search engines aren’t free, but I’m just not there yet enough to pay for a search engine. I don’t have ads on my network period, haven’t in decades. I also filter heavily through pFsense and other means. So, while I am admittedly still contributing somewhat to a major search engine, at the very least I have still retained most of my data, and search results must be selected with prudence.
I hear you! I was on the same boat - I had telemetry locked down as much as possible, but I eventually got tired of the arms race and decided to give Kagi a spin.
Took a while to commit but a big selling point was being able to bring my very non-technical wife along for the ride.
If you’re interested, try something like searxng and route it through a VPN or vps.
I do run a Searxng private instance and love it.
Why the nabu casa subscription? It sounds like everything they offer you (access from anywhere, backup, voice) is something that you could already do with your existing setup
Not OP
It also supports HA development, and keeps me from requiring my wife to understand tailscale.
Cant you just install a VPN profile on your wife’s phone? Like companies do
Can, but there are issues. As you travel and change towers, that vpn connection has to tear down and be rebuilt on the next IP. Towers are only a couple miles apart best case so at 60, any realtime ip communication gets bad. She doesn’t love running the client full time and just wants to see the ip cameras.
The real solution would be simply stand up an haproxy with https and require a specific certificate to communicate. which i can do… but why when i’d just want to donate to home assistant anyway.
Your last paragraph is explanation enough I agree. But tbh the phone tower thing sounds like an edge case. Yes, if your wife is watching the live feed of the cameras and is sitting on a highspeed train it will happen but that doesn’t sound like a very likely scenario to me. Although I probably underestimate the times you are actually moving while checking the cameras. Cuz idle time on transportation is a good time to do that. Anyways thanks for keeping the lights in the Casa turned on.
The vpn drops and renegotiates, if you’re on a facetime, if you’re on a meet, if you’re listening to streaming radio.
As someone else said, the main reason is to support the devs.
Secondary benefit is the features are seamless and not something I have to maintain. I only have so much time in my day, so I have to choose which things I want to DIY and which I want to pay someone else to manage, but that’s a side benefit to supporting the devs.