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Three obsolete office PCs, sixty bucks, and a copy of Proxmox VE. We ran a real home-lab workload on e-waste for 90 days, logged every watt and every failure, and found the exact moment cheap hardware stops being a bargain.
We spent 30 days comparing a $40 router running OpenWrt with a $199 three-node mesh kit in a busy home office. The cheap box lost the coverage contest, won the bufferbloat fight, and forced us to put a dollar value on setup time.
We installed osTicket, Zammad, and UVdesk on the same $6/month VPS and ran the same ticket scenarios for a week each. Setup time, email ingestion, routing, SLA tracking, upgrades, and one messy recovery later, here is the pick for US small shops.
We stuffed llama.cpp, Ollama, LocalAI, Jan, and GPT4All onto a $239 Intel N100 mini PC and measured tokens per second, RAM ceilings, and setup pain. Two of them are worth your time on this hardware — the rest depend entirely on what you're building.