For me it was mostly one time setup cost and once-every-2-years Debian upgrade.
unattended-upgrade does the security upgrades and I occasionally upgrade the rss reader (as it is not packaged)
mail was pretty much fire-and-forget postfix+dovecot on file config, no DB for list of accounts + some catchalls.
If I had to pay say $5 for each of those services vs pay myself to manage that it would more less come out the same, minus ability to fix any little annoyances I had directly vs hoping cloud provider gives an option for it.
I do use syncthing for file sync so no annoying dealings with PHP apps
unattended-upgrade does the security upgrades and I occasionally upgrade the rss reader (as it is not packaged)
mail was pretty much fire-and-forget postfix+dovecot on file config, no DB for list of accounts + some catchalls.
If I had to pay say $5 for each of those services vs pay myself to manage that it would more less come out the same, minus ability to fix any little annoyances I had directly vs hoping cloud provider gives an option for it.
I do use syncthing for file sync so no annoying dealings with PHP apps