Self-Hosting Everything: A Mini PC, Proxmox, and Saying No to Free Tiers

A project that makes no money still has to be affordable somehow. Free tiers looked generous on paper, but between CI minutes, database limits, and vendor lock-in, I kept hitting walls. The honest fix was less exciting than a clever SaaS stack: I bought a cheap used mini desktop PC and started virtualizing everything on Proxmox.

Proxmox turned out to be genuinely fun to work with — easy to manage, with backup options that actually inspire confidence. Within weeks I was running my own GitLab instance, YouTrack for project tracking, and SonarQube for code quality, all on hardware I owned outright. It became the playground for every private project since, including the infrastructure behind Aeondera itself.