This is a decent chart and I agree with everything the people above me have already said (even though I would strongly advise against a beginner using a LLM for support because they are so blatantly wrong a lot of the time). However, self-hosting is a large umbrella term that could be disambiguated here.
If you:
- are comfortable running Linux on your own hardware (or suffering through reading 15 year old Reddit posts)
- don’t have money to spend with big tech
- have consistent, guaranteed 24/7 internet and power
- do not have ISP-imposed restrictions (such as a closed port 80/443 or dynamic ipv4)
- can do basic networking (port forwarding)
- have a spare computer (can be an old office box with 4gb of ddr3 realistically so long as you have a SSD)
… then I would definitely recommend hosting on your own hardware. It gets a bad reputation a lot of the time around here for reasons unknown to me (variability?) but so long as you are capable of it then I would definitely recommend giving it a go! Self-hosting has always been my way of doing things and it was great when I was younger and couldn’t afford cloud. Even now, I choose to self-host on local servers because it’s cheap, predictable, and you’re free to do things however you’d like.
There is a lot to learn with self-hosting and even if you manage to successfully install it on either your own hardware or a VPS , you’ll still have more work cut out for you. You can always skip all of this and go for a hosted plan but if you’re looking to save money then self-hosting (especially on your own hardware) is great.