Aug 9, 2026
What a year of running our own hardware actually cost us
We moved our staging environment onto a refurbished server in the office to cut cloud spend. Twelve months on, here is the honest accounting. Saved: roughly ₹31,000 a month in cloud bills. Spent: ₹92,000 on the machine, ₹18,000 on a UPS after the second power cut corrupted a disk, two full weekends of setup, and about one evening a month on maintenance. It broke even around month five. Whether it was worth it depends on how you value the weekends. What genuinely surprised me: the reliability was fine. What did not surprise me: nobody else on the team wanted to learn how to look after it, so the bus factor is one — and that one is me. Would I do it again for staging? Yes. For production? Not without a second person who knows the setup.
