My Homelab Stack: Everything I Actually Run (and What It Costs)
A full tour of my budget homelab stack: the hardware, every service I run grouped by job, and the real monthly cost breakdown with numbers.
The hardware guides linked from this article contain Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
I’ve written a lot of posts on this site about individual services and hardware choices. What I haven’t done is just… show you everything, all at once, with the actual numbers. So here it is. Every service humming in my closet right now, what it runs on, and what it actually costs me per month.
This is not a beginner “start with these five things” post. That article already exists. If you’re just getting started, read The Budget Homelab Starter Stack first and come back here when you’re ready to go deeper. If you haven’t bought hardware yet, the build a homelab for under $300 article covers the complete hardware shopping list before you touch any software. This post is for people who want to see a full working stack with real cost math before they commit to building their own.
The hardware it runs on
The whole stack runs on a single Beelink S12 Pro. It’s an N100 mini PC, 16GB RAM stock, and I’ve got a 1TB NVMe for the OS and container data plus a 4TB external USB drive for media and backups. Total hardware spend was around $185 for the mini PC and another $90 for the external drive.
Idle power draw is 6-8 watts under normal load. Under heavy Jellyfin transcoding it peaks around 18 watts. A Kill A Watt meter confirmed those numbers. If you haven’t metered your own machine, do it. The assumptions people run with are almost always off in one direction or the other.
I also run a small UPS behind the whole thing. An APC 600VA UPS keeps it alive through brief outages and protects the drives from a dirty shutdown. At 8 watts average draw, 600VA is comfortably oversized, which means it’ll run the box for close to an hour on battery if the power goes out.
If you’re still deciding on what hardware to buy, the best mini PC for homelab guide for 2026 covers current options across the N100, N305, and Ryzen 5 class machines, with power and price trade-offs for each. And if you want to understand why I’m not running a tower with a big GPU, the low power homelab under 25 watts piece explains the math.
The base layer: Proxmox and Docker
The OS is Proxmox VE. Everything runs as either an LXC container or a Docker host VM. I use Proxmox because it gives me proper snapshot-and-restore, the ability to run isolated VMs when I need them, and a management UI that doesn’t require me to SSH into the box every time I want to check something.
Most services run in Docker Compose inside a single Ubuntu VM. I keep it that way because Docker is the ecosystem where most self-hosted apps live, and Compose files are portable. If I ever need to move something to different hardware, it’s a yaml file and a volume copy.
The Proxmox on a Mini PC setup walkthrough covers hardware selection, BIOS prep, and the full ISO install for a mini PC specifically, which has a couple of gotchas compared to a standard PC. After that, Docker Compose basics is worth reading before you have more than three or four containers going, because the organizational decisions you make early stick around.
I also keep Proxmox snapshots and backups in rotation. The Proxmox snapshots and backups guide covers the setup. This saved me once when a container update went sideways and I needed to roll back without losing a week of Paperless data.
What I actually run
Networking and access
Nginx Proxy Manager sits in front of everything. Every service gets a clean subdomain and a valid HTTPS certificate. No more bookmarking IP:port combinations. The NPM setup guide covers the full setup, including the Let’s Encrypt cert automation.
Tailscale handles remote access. No open ports on my router, no VPN server to maintain. I install it on the homelab machine and any device I want to access it from, and everything connects over an encrypted mesh network. The Tailscale homelab setup guide is a quick read; the whole thing takes about 20 minutes to get working.
Files and documents
Syncthing keeps my files synced between the server and my laptop without any cloud in the middle. I use it primarily for my notes vault. It’s been running for over a year with zero drama.
Paperless-ngx handles documents. Scan once, OCR and index automatically, search by keyword forever. The inbox folder watches for new files and processes them without any interaction. The Paperless-ngx setup guide is solid. I spent one afternoon on the initial tagging configuration and haven’t touched it since.
Vaultwarden is my self-hosted Bitwarden password manager. All Bitwarden apps work with it, my vault data never leaves the network, and it replaced a $10/month Bitwarden Premium subscription. The Vaultwarden setup guide covers it from install to first login.
Media and photos
Jellyfin is the media server. It handles movies and TV over local streaming, with no Plex Pass, no subscription, and no analytics phoning home. Hardware-accelerated transcoding on the N100 means it handles 1080p without breaking a sweat. The Jellyfin setup guide gets you from zero to streaming in an afternoon.
Immich handles photos and videos. Google Photos alternative, self-hosted, with face recognition and mobile backup via the Immich app. The facial tagging works well enough that my family actually uses it. The Immich setup guide covers the Docker setup and the initial library import.
Monitoring
Uptime Kuma watches all my services and sends me a notification when something goes down before my family notices it first. Simple dashboard, dead easy to set up, runs in one container. The Uptime Kuma setup guide is short because the tool is just not that complicated.
What I don’t run that you might expect
No Home Assistant, because I have very little smart home gear. No Nextcloud, because Syncthing covers my file sync needs with less surface area. No arr stack yet, because I haven’t needed it. If you run more media automation than I do, those are sensible additions. They just don’t earn their keep in my specific setup.
What it costs me per month
Here’s the actual number, broken down.
| Line item | Monthly cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity | $1.20 | 8W avg @ $0.13/kWh, 24/7 |
| Backblaze B2 (off-site backup) | $0.60 | ~120GB backup data |
| Domain (five custom subdomains) | $1.25 | Amortized annual cost |
| Hardware amortization (36 mo) | $7.64 | $185 PC + $90 drive / 36 |
| UPS (amortized 60 mo) | $0.90 | ~$55 unit / 60 months |
| Total | $11.59 |
What does $11.59/month buy? A password manager, a file sync service, a document scanner and archive, a media server, a photo library, remote access to everything, and monitoring. If you were paying for cloud equivalents:
| What I replaced | Old cost |
|---|---|
| Google One 2TB | $10/month |
| Bitwarden Premium | $10/month |
| Plex Pass (lifetime amortized) | $4/month |
| Google Photos (2TB storage) | $10/month |
| VPN subscription | $8/month |
| Cloud total | $42/month |
The self-hosting vs cloud cost breakdown goes deeper on this math, including the honest case for when cloud is actually cheaper. And if you want the full year-one picture with hardware included, the homelab total cost breakdown runs the complete TCO numbers.
My power usage math and the 8-watt figure are not estimates. They come from a Kill A Watt session over a full week. The homelab power usage piece explains how to run your own measurement and why the numbers matter for long-run cost.
What I’d cut if I had to
If I had to get this down to the bare minimum, I’d keep Tailscale, NPM, Syncthing, and Vaultwarden. Those four services cover the essential infrastructure: secure access, file sync, and credential management. Everything else is valuable but not critical.
Immich would be the first thing back. Paperless second. Jellyfin third.
If this whole stack looks like too much to start with, read The Budget Homelab Starter Stack. It’s five services that cover 90% of the value with a fraction of the setup time. The stack I described in that post took me a single weekend to build from scratch. What I’ve described here took about six months of gradual additions.
The real lesson of the cost table above is that the monthly number barely changes as you add services. The electricity bump from running five more containers on an N100 is noise. The per-service amortization is trivial. The heavy cost is the hardware upfront, and that’s a one-time hit spread across three years.
Running costs under $12 a month. Replaced $42 in cloud subscriptions. No vendor lock-in, no data leaving my network, no subscription price hikes. That’s the actual case for a budget homelab, stated plainly with real numbers. If you’ve been on the fence, this is what it looks like on the other side.