Hosting cost comparison for monitoring stacks

Rough monthly costs for Cloudflare edge Astro, Vercel Next.js, VPS Node, and home relay power draw.

Total cost of ownership includes domain, hosting, Stripe fees, Supabase tier, electricity for the Arduino stack, and optional VPS for Python relays. Comparing full-stack options without dollars hides why this repo chose Astro on Cloudflare with residential upstream JSON.

Bar chart comparing monthly costs of edge, VPS, and home relay hosting options
Hobby monitoring costs split across edge hosting, database tier, and home relay power.

Cloudflare + Supabase path

  • Workers/Pages — often free tier for modest traffic.
  • Supabase — free tier for small history; watch row growth.
  • Home relay — existing PC or Pi power only.

VPS Node/Next path

$5–20/month VPS running Express or Next with cron polling—predictable bill, you maintain OS patches. Docker on same VPS consolidates services.

Hidden costs

Developer time for TLS and security, billing webhooks, and ladder trips to reboot firmware. Edge deployment reduces ops time; hardware stays the same either way.