[sylens]

The upfront costs are pretty big but over time it’s not too bad to do 3-2-1. I doubt you’ll come out on top of Google every time - there’s a reason their prices are so low, and that’s more of an incentive to leave than to save a few dollars.

For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.