I Stopped Paying Google and Built My Own Cloud

How I replaced Google Photos, Google Drive, and Google Home with a self-hosted Raspberry Pi 5 setup - and what the full technical stack looks like. There's a quiet moment every tech-literate person eventually hits. You open your cloud storage dashboard, see the number creeping up, and think: I'm paying a subscription fee, every month, forever, just to store my own photos and files on someone else's computer. That was me, but with a bit of added weight. It's not just my data I'm responsible for. Over the years, I've quietly become the unofficial digital curator for my entire family . The person everyone sends photos to after a birthday party. The one who backs up the wedding videos. The one who scans and stores the important documents, passports, contracts, and sentimental things so they don't get lost. My parents, siblings, extended family: if something matters and it's digital, there's a good chance it eventually lands with me. That's a responsibility I take seriously. And for a long time, Google was my answer - until the storage bill started quietly creeping past 2TB, and I started thinking more carefully about what it actually means to hand all of that data over to "big tech" . So I built my own home server. A tiny, almost silent box sitting in my house that now handles everything Google Drive and Google Photos did, plus more, for a one-time hardware cost of £340. This is the story of how I did it, why I did it, and exactly how you can too. Why I Did It The cost was the trigger, but it wasn't the only reason. When you use Google Photos, Google Drive, or any cloud storage service, your files live on their servers. You're trusting a corporation to keep them safe, not snoop through them, not change their pricing, and not shut down the product one day. Google has a long history of killing beloved products. Google Photos itself famously ended its unlimited free tier in 2021. As well as this, recent AI trends and auto opt-in data processing had me thinking there had to