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Comment by remus | Hacker News Reader

User migrates photos off of Google Photos == user spends $60 on external hard drive + x hours of their time moving everything across. Seems a shit setup compared to forking over a pretty small amount of money to google for a very convenient service (especially when the hard drive dies and you realise the backups are out of date).

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The problem is that things like photo storage and emails are really non negotiable. Most people need these things as a basic digital necessity. Google is well aware of it, and it knows that it can increase fees or reduce storage space in the future, and most of the folks will keep sticking around because the company holds a lifetime of emails and photos as hostages. It's just like the pusher who increases their rates for cocaïne, well aware that people who are hooked onto it will keep paying whatever.

I've spent quite some money and time to set up my own cloud, but the initial investment paid itself back after 2 years already when compared to the monthly cost of Google One. Companies like Google need to understand that, if they try to pull too much the rope of profit, even if that means hurting services that people have started to take for granted and built their lives around, then people will just start leaving.

Everybody is different, but my privacy and desire to not use my life as a feed for google AI & ML makes this a very small price to pay to move away.

Couple this with migrating to something self hosted like nextcloud, and I cant see why anyone would possibly pay google $2 per month to be part of their data aggregating empire.

I'm almost positive my home server (which is a lower end, but newer desktop) costs more than $2 a month.

I don't think Nextcloud's photos app would run well on something like a Raspberry Pi either, considering when I tried my photo collection in it, it would consume enough RAM to crash the 8GB VM it was in and give up.

While I have time and knowledge to troubleshoot, realize most don't and $2 is less than an XL coffee.

It is completely subjective and relies heavily on how much you value your privacy.

For me, the cost of running a home server is far less than the cost of Google having my entire digital footprint.

I really want a hybrid solution. Where my files are in both the Cloud and my Local NAS. I can cut off my subscription whenever I want, and I can change and sort the files on my Server at much faster speed. I also get the extra protection of offsite backup and redundancy check for files corruption.

> I really want a hybrid solution. Where my files are in both the Cloud and my Local NAS.

IPFS?

The alternative is to pay Google a fee each month forever. And when they decide to raise the fee, give them more money. And go along with any current and future privacy policy. As opposed to spending x fewer hours scrolling Facebook.

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