XDA Developers

A developer replaced six paid subscriptions (Plex Pass, UptimeRobot Pro, NextDNS, and others) totaling ~$400/year by running self-hosted alternatives on an old business laptop using Debian and Docker. The stack includes Jellyfin for media, Uptime Kuma for monitoring, Pi-hole with dnscrypt-proxy for network-wide DNS blocking, and more. The post covers both the practical benefits — built-in UPS via laptop battery, low power draw, portability — and honest trade-offs like initial setup time, occasional maintenance, and polish gaps in some open-source mobile apps compared to paid services.

I replaced 6 paid subscriptions with a homelab on an old laptop — here's the full stack

The laptop nobody wanted is still running everything

This guy had subscriptions to services I’ve never even heard of before 😂

It’s all well until your PC or hard drive stops working. You should always back up to the cloud.

Well, everything has its down- and upsides. For example, now you have to take care of your important services yourself. If your old laptop breaks, too bad. If an update breaks something, again, too bad.
It’s not a question, of what is simply “better” it’s a question of priorities.

I use these mentioned service but instead of using jellyfin, i use plex without the subscription. I really appreciate and love self hosted apps, even if it requires efforts for technical setup, but once in place, we are relieved 😊.