What it costs
Most homelab write-ups end with a figure that was typed once and never revisited. This page reads its own, and sorts it the way the question is actually asked: not by vendor, but by what each service costs to run.
The bill
The game server−$1.00 a month
Minecraft for a handful of friends, reached through a rented machine so nothing at home is exposed to the internet.
| What it is | A month | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| The rented machine at the edge | $6.00 | a checked price the plan's published price, pending a billing credentialLast checked 7 September 2026.a fixed monthly plan, and the bandwidth it forwards is clamped below the included allowance. This becomes measured from the provider's own pending charges as soon as a read-only billing credential exists |
| A hosted subscription, no longer paid for | −$7.00 | a checked price the published price of the subscription, cancelled when the world moved homeLast checked 7 September 2026.the reason this service costs less than nothing to run |
Backups, one copy off the propertynothing a month
Three copies of everything that matters, on two kinds of storage, one of them not in this building.
| What it is | A month | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Off-site storage7.2 GB stored | $0.00 | measured the stored bytes themselves, measured by the machine that writes the backupsthe first 10 GB are free, so nothing is charged yet |
The machines, and the name they answer to$31.83 a month
What every service above stands on. This is paid for the estate existing: it would be very nearly the same if all but one of the services stopped, which is why none of it is charged to any of them.
| What it is | A month | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity157 kWh a month | $30.96 | measured the machines’ own sensors, priced at 19.67¢ per kilowatt-hour — the marginal rate on the most recent residential bill, in the more expensive of this utility’s two seasons, so the figure errs high rather than low210 W on the battery, of which 282 W is the primary node; the bill is priced on 215 W, the average of 168 hourly readings, and 200–250 W is the range they cover |
| The domain | $0.87 | a checked price a .com registration at costLast checked 7 September 2026.$10.44 a year, shown here by the month |
| Tunnel, DNS and certificates | $0.00 | a checked price the published free tierLast checked 7 September 2026.the outbound tunnel, the zone and its certificates cost nothing at this size |
| Cloud storage for infrastructure state | $0.00 | a checked price the account, which has held no chargeable resource since the public service moved to the edge nodeLast checked 7 September 2026.bounded by a budget that removes everything in it if that budget is ever exceeded. Not measured live: reading the bill would need a credential the estate deliberately does not hold |
The machines cost $2,090.00 once — spread over 5 years that is $34.83 a month. A server, its drives and an uninterruptible supply, all bought second-hand. A retired enterprise server costs a fraction of what it cost new, and rather more than that to run.
Seven more services cost nothing beyond the machines they run on: this website, alerts, the reverse proxy, latency graphs, uptime monitoring, DNS filtering and the watch on the other node. Each is a container on hardware that is already powered on, running software that is free to use, under a name the estate already pays for.
Every month, everything: $30.83. Everything the estate runs costs nothing on top of the machines it runs on — or less than nothing, where a service replaced something that was being paid for. Prices are in US dollars.
2 of these 7 lines are read from a machine every hour; the rest are prices a person checked, each showing when. The measurements were read 18 October 2026, 10:13 UTC, 34 minutes ago.
Why the machines are their own line
The obvious thing to do with an electricity bill is to divide it between the services and give each one a share. That would be an invented number. A four-socket server draws very nearly the same power whether it is running one container or nine, and every container on this estate reports a processor share that rounds to zero — there is no measurable load to divide. Worse, a per-service share reads as a saving: it implies that stopping a service would return that money, and it would not.
So the machines, the domain and the tunnel are grouped as the platform, and nothing is charged to a service that would still be paid without it. What each service costs above the platform is what would actually stop being paid if it stopped — which for most of them is nothing, and for one of them is less than nothing.
How each figure is known
Every line says which of three things it is, in words rather than in a colour.
- Measured. A machine reports the quantity every hour and the estate prices it. Electricity comes from the primary node’s own management controller and from the uninterruptible supply, which reports everything plugged into it; off-site storage is measured from the stored bytes themselves.
- Fetched. A vendor’s interface reports the price. Live, but slow-moving.
- A checked price. A person read the price and recorded the date they read it. Not live, and the date says so — after a year without a check, the page says that too. This is the honest state for a price no interface will report, and it is what most such pages are without admitting it.
A collector on the primary node writes the measured figures once an hour into a small document: amounts and dates, nothing else. The public site renders that document and the prices kept beside it. It holds no credential of its own, opens no connection to a vendor, and could not be made to — so a compromise of this site would reveal exactly what this page already tells any visitor.
Electricity is priced at the marginal rate from the most recent residential bill: every per-kilowatt-hour charge on it, plus local tax. The fixed daily service charge is excluded deliberately, because it is the price of having an electric service at all and is paid whether or not a machine is running. It is a summer rate, the more expensive of this utility’s two seasons, so the figure errs high.
What is left out, and why
- Time. The hours are the real price of an estate like this one, and putting an hourly rate on them would be an invention. They are also the point: this exists in order to be built.
- The household internet connection. It was paid for before any of this existed and would be paid for if all of it stopped.
- The cloud provider’s bill. Reading it live would require a credential the estate deliberately does not hold. The account has carried no chargeable resource since the public service moved to the edge node, and a budget removes everything in it if that ever changes, so it appears as a checked nothing rather than a measured one.
What the shape of it says
The interesting figure is not the total. It is that the machines cost more than everything running on them put together, several times over, and that the one service with a bill of its own costs less than nothing — the subscription it replaced was more expensive than the rented machine that now fronts it.
A retired enterprise server costs very little to acquire and a great deal to run, and that trade is visible here in a way a purchase price alone never shows. It is also the reason the auxiliary node is a retired desktop rather than a second server, and the reason the one internet-facing machine is rented by the month rather than added to the rack. Those choices, and the ones that went the other way, are on the decisions page.