[compsciphd]

if your PC only consumes 50w (somewhat low for a desktop). and your power is 20c a KWH (a little high on average, but not crazy high, though perhaps 0 in a dorm room). you'll be spending $7-$8 a month just on electricity. So it's not "free" to run it on your PC. now, if you view that your PC runs 24/7 anyways, perhaps (much like the dorm room case) the marginal cost is 0. I'm simply making the case that it might not be, and it could very well be a significant %age of the linode cost.

[evilos]

But it feels basically free which is the important thing vs having to set up billing. $20 a month is a lot if you're a teenager with limited or no income.

[southerntofu]

It's not entirely free, but the cost is shared with other usage of your computer, and you have much more resources at your disposal.

Then and now, any second hand hardware will yield more computing power than cheap VMs you can rent. (of course you can rent a dedicated server with 32 cores and 128GB RAM nowadays, this doesn't change that entry level offers are very limited on resources compared to what you can easily find AFK)