As someone who has done both I couldn't agree more.

I run Home Assistant and could just pay their subscription to get external access, which also supports development. But I'm a cheap Yorkshireman so I went with DuckDNS, Let's Encrypt, Nginx and all that jazz for a long time. I'm just trying to hook my home up to Google so I can talk to it, I don't wanna pay money!

I had so many bloody glitches! I'd have to sign things in on a weekly basis, Google lost access all the damn time and it was just a nuisance.

I have a rule for hobbies, I do it cheap for at least a few months to see if I lose interest. If I get a bit obsessive, it's worth spending money on the hobby.

So after a year or two of fucking around with Nginx and DuckDNS I found the cloudflare plugin, which worked for free for a while. It was night and day, everything remained connected!

It ultimately bugged out one day and I decided to just bite the bullet and buy a domain. It's a hobby I've invested enough time in that a few quid for a solution that just works is worth it.

I think I dropped £35 for 5 years (I forget, it might be a decade) of owning my own .com domain name, which cloudflare manages for me.

I now have to reconnect my Google home to my home assistant once every couple of months instead of every week.

I haven't missed the money, and I certainly haven't missed the fucking tinkering to get it to work.