If anything this makes me feel better since my workload doesn’t require very beefy machines and the amount id be saving is basically irrelevant compared to my labor costs.
Yes, bare metal is not a panacea. Some use cases require 0 personnel change going bare metal (even having reduced labor), and some are very much the opposite.
Love the tool and UI you built. I homelab and while not always on 24/7 its way more affordable to run on my own bare metal than pay a cloud provider. I also get super fast local speeds.
Didn't know there was a verb for it! I "homelab" too and so far am very happy. With a (free) CDN in front of it it can handle spikes in traffic (that are rare anyways), and everything is simple and mostly free (since the machines are already there).
I rent a moderate sized Hetner box running FreeBSD and just spin up a jail (zfs helps here) or if necessary a bhyve VM per 'thing.'
I'd fire a box up at home instead but at ~£35/mo I can never quite find the motivation compared to spending the time hacking on one of my actual projects instead.
(I do suspect if I ever -did- find the motivation I'd wonder why I hadn't done so sooner; so it goes)