I've transitioned between cloud services and self-hosting a few times:
1. Vercel Phase
My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep.
2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify)
Later, I started setting up my own server with Hetzner and deploying with Coolify. Since Coolify is open-source and free, I only had to cover the cost of a VPS (even $5 a month was sufficient). I could deploy PostgreSQL instances and run a web server on it.
But later I discovered that even this way, I still had to spend a lot of effort maintaining PostgreSQL and Redis. Even though they were containerized with Docker, managing them was still troublesome. I needed to pass various system and environment variables between services, which was very tedious.
3. Cloudflare Phase
So later I switched to Cloudflare. With Cloudflare Workers, I can deploy fullstack applications and use D1 Database and Cloudflare KV to replace Redis. These features can be called directly within the Worker without needing to pass environment variables.
Plus, the local development experience is excellent and the pricing is very reasonable, so I've been using Cloudflare's entire suite ever since.
I had a similar experience recently. I had a huge Swagger JSON file that would waste too many tokens if added directly to the context, so I told the agent in memory to use jq to retrieve what it needs when it wants to check this document. This saved a lot of cost.
I use Wallet purely to satisfy my collecting habit. I like to add movie tickets to it after purchasing them in the movie app, so I can look back at all the movies I've watched from many years ago until now.
But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.
However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.