Money vs. Hassle

Until recently I lived my digital life with open source software, self-hosting, driven by privacy, encryption and owning my data. You get the feeling you're contributing to a better world with more freedom and less 'capitalistic' practices. It didn't cost me much, except time and some 'overhead' in my operations.

On the other side we have services that aren't free (as in beer), but provide cross-platform services with immediate synchronization. And with throw-away mail addresses you don't have to reveal that much from your identity if you don't want to. And when you're lucky those services run open source software anyway.

So what you pay for is the hosting, maintenance, cross platform applications and instantaneous synchronization between those.

Compare that with the 'free' alternative where I had to take care of updates, backups and 'sync' with Git on a central server (so yeah I had to pay for a VPS).

So it's really a balance between money or hassle, and I tend to err on the 'money' side because I'd like to spend my time more useful than being busy with nothing.

Side effect by being less involved with open source software is less exposure to snobs, elitists and purists that judge you for even thinking about non-free solutions. And are happy to point you to some inferior unmaintained solution instead. No thank you.