It’s a black hole for your wallet. Once you start. You can’t stop.

But I also now have a bunch of electrician tools for running wires, some private cameras that aren’t google or Amazon spying on everyone that walks by, and a network that isn’t bogged down by a couple people watching Netflix.

And I have plans for MORE.

I make sure to never count the cost!

But, its all used and all over a number of years, so not as much as you'd think. If you went out and tried to get it all at once, it would be crazy. Most things I spent a good while waiting for the right deal to come up

Like the UPS alone, I saved probably close to $3000 off MSRP

If you're crafty you can work around this- three of my servers (2 NAS boxes and a Proxmox box) were custom built from commodity hardware. I literally bought plain ol uATX and ITX decommed business gear from my local uni surplus store and a P-Link chassis for each used from eBay. I spent more on drives than I did machines (Y'ALL WANNA KNOW HOW MUCH IT COSTS TO BUY 16TB WORTH OF SSDS FOR ZFS MIRRORS? TOO. DAMN. MUCH.)

You really gotta do some due diligence to make sure you're not buying lemon parts but it's very possible to get a beefy homelab at fair prices!

Cost of electricity is an other factor to consider

It can be reasonable if you wait for good 2nd hand deals on equipment, especially from startups shutting down.

My 10G switch with PoE and 4 SFP+ ports cost only $100, for example, while many new products with similar specs cost $600+.