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Invoicing, bookkeeping, CRM, and file storage for a solo US business, all running on one mini PC for 60 days. We tracked setup hours, tax-season friction, backup failures, and the real break-even against a $30-a-month SaaS stack.
A three-person office spent five working days on Linux Mint, and we logged every support ticket and hidden cost. The software was free; the labor bill was not.
I replaced a consumer router with a $75 surplus thin client running OPNsense and tracked 90 days of real work-from-home traffic, video calls, VPN sessions, and power draw. The cheap firewall wins more often than I expected, but it also has a few time traps worth knowing before you buy.
Restic, Borg, Duplicati, and UrBackup cost zero dollars to license and several thousand dollars a year to operate. We model the egress fees, scripting hours, and untested-restore risk across three small-business scenarios so you can see the real number before you commit.