Zero budget. No subscriptions. Full control.

What started as a zero-budget challenge has grown into a fully self-hosted home infrastructure project — built entirely from hardware that was already sitting unused and with only minor upgrades and repairs, total spend to date remains under $200.

The setup runs across two repurposed machines. A 2012 MacBook Pro stays on around the clock, handling smart-home automation of IoT devices, availability monitoring and network wide ad blocking.

The other machine is a 10-year-old custom pc, running TrueNAS with ZFS storage pools across multiple drives, running a suite of containerised applications via Docker, and full VM management. This server powers up each afternoon to stream media and handle heavier workloads at peak periods and safely shutting down when not in use, keeping electricity costs in check.

Underpinning it all is a cybersecurity-first mindset — granular access controls, isolated service accounts, SSH hardening, and least-privilege permissions applied throughout. All servers run a VPN that handles two roles: network privacy, and secure remote access, so media is available from anywhere, not just at home.

The result is a household that streams media on demand, manages its own photo library, monitors its own uptime, and runs without a single ongoing subscription — built from spare parts and open-source software.

​