> Are the services really worth it?

Yes.

> self hosting and diy, cheap, better understanding, and imo more reliable.

What is the cost to get something that has a better uptime than the SLA's of the services you are replacing?

Focus on getting to paying customers. After that, you'll see where your time is better off spent.

Example: I just signed up for a trial for Stripe Sigma. I was going to build my own basic BI using their API. Instead it costs my business ~$10/mo at our size. Now I can spend what would have been time to build, test, deploy that service, to instead just answer the business questions I had.