> home lab

Well that's your problem right there. The home labber setups are for experimentation or "hot rodding" purposes and they typically way overbuild their solutions.

What most people need is an old desktop in a corner somewhere (preferably close to your router so you can get to it with an ethernet cable).

It's won't be Grandma proof, but if you're remotely technical you can write a docker compose file that glues together some useful home server utilities that sound interesting to you.

My setup is roughly speaking: Ubuntu LTS, ZFS (with 4 disks in a RAID10 style config), and a docker compose file that runs plex, transmission, syncthing, vaultwarden behind an nginx-proxy[1] container that even automagically renews my Let's Encrypt certs for me (though it's probably even easier if you use a Cloudflare tunnel).

If you're confident all your apps are available on these platforms, the storage part is easier with something like TruNAS or Unraid. If you don't need storage at all you can slim down your hardware a lot and just use a raspberry pi.

IMO, just find an old beater machine and get hacking :)

[1]: https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy

>It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.

You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300.

Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years

Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything.

This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear. A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start.

Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)

We're teetering on the brink of highly capable software agents that can run on a phone using a local model, that can manage things like basic digital hygiene, operating a self-hosted cloud, with tailscale and other private vpns that can leverage your own home internet service with a well maintained set of firewall rules and level of locked-down access that it's actually practical.

An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster.

We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.

It’s like drugs, the first hit is cheap or free, but you end up spending all your money and your entire life on it!

Just get an old server for free somewhere and go …

People overengineer homelabs all the time for fun and practice. To selfhost (which is not, in fact, the same thing), you can get a mini PC and probably host all of the basics. A small two-bay NAS plus a mini PC and you're really cooking with gas.

Homelab = Experimenting with environments you might use at work. Selfhost = Hosting what you need at home.

These are two very different goals with very different reasonable choices. People homelab with Kubernetes clusters, selfhosting with Kubernetes is dumb.