VPS or a Mac mini at home? The 24-month cost, and the two cases where home wins
Short answer: over 24 months a €7/month VPS costs about €168. A used M1 Mac mini costs about €350 upfront plus roughly €30 of electricity, and you still own a computer at the end. On money alone it is close to a tie. The VPS wins on uptime, a public IP and not exposing your home network. The Mac mini wins only if you already own one, or you want to run local models. Most people should rent.
The money, over 24 months
People compare "€7 a month" with "€350 once" and get confused because the units differ. Put both on the same clock: two years, which is about how long you keep a setup before changing something.
| Option | Upfront | Per month | 24 months | What you own after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner CPX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB) | €0 | €6.99 + ~€1 IPv4 | ≈ €192 | Nothing |
| Contabo VPS S (4 vCPU, 8 GB) | €0 | €6.00 | ≈ €144 | Nothing |
| Hostinger KVM 2 (8 GB, 24-mo term) | €0 | €6.99 intro, €13.99 renewal | ≈ €168 first term | Nothing |
| Used M1 Mac mini (8 GB) | ≈ €350 | ≈ €1.30 electricity | ≈ €381 | A Mac mini worth ~€250 |
| Used M1 Mac mini, resold after | ≈ €350 | ≈ €1.30 | ≈ €131 net | Cash back |
| Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) | ≈ €110 incl. case, PSU, SSD | ≈ €0.60 | ≈ €124 | A Pi |
Electricity: M1 Mac mini idles around 7 W and averages perhaps 10 W with an agent on it; 10 W × 24 h × 30 days = 7.2 kWh/month; at a European average of €0.18/kWh that is €1.30. Pi 5 at ~4 W average is about €0.60. Prices are August 2026, Western Europe. Change the electricity rate and the second-hand price and the sums move, but the conclusion does not.
So: if you resell the Mac mini at the end, it is the cheapest option on the table. If you do not, it is the most expensive. The Pi is cheap but OpenClaw on ARM with browser automation is an exercise in patience; Hermes runs fine on it.
What the money does not show
Four things that decide this more than the €50 difference:
- Uptime. A VPS stays up through your power cuts, router reboots and your partner unplugging the wrong cable. An agent you talk to from your phone is only useful if it answers. Home setups answer 98% of the time; that missing 2% is always when you need it.
- A public IP and no port forwarding. OpenClaw's channels mostly call out, so you can run it behind NAT, but the moment you want a webhook, a web UI or a second device to reach it, you are opening your home router to the internet. A VPS has a public IP by design and nothing else of yours behind it.
- Blast radius. An agent that can run shell commands, browse and hold API keys is a juicy target. On a VPS, a compromise costs you a server. At home, it sits on the same network as your laptop, your NAS and your smart lock.
- Your time. A VPS is rebuilt from a snapshot in minutes. A Mac mini that will not boot is an afternoon.
The two cases where home wins
1. You already own the machine
If there is a Mac mini or a capable mini-PC on a shelf, the upfront cost is zero and the sum is not close: €30 of electricity versus €150 to €190 of rent over two years. Run it at home, put the agent in a container, and use a tunnel (Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale) instead of opening ports. You give up some uptime; you keep €150.
2. You want local models
Hermes Agent in particular is happy talking to a local model. An M-series Mac with 16 GB or more runs useful small models that a €7 VPS cannot touch, and it does so without per-token API cost. If "no cloud, no API bill" is the point of the exercise, the VPS is the wrong tool. You are now shopping for RAM and a GPU, not for hosting.
The hybrid nobody mentions
Run the agent on a cheap VPS for uptime and reachability, and point it at a model running on your home Mac over a tunnel for the heavy inference. The VPS is the always-on front door; the Mac is the brain that only needs to be awake when you ask something. It is more moving parts, and it is the setup several of us actually use.
Decide
- Nothing suitable at home, want it to just work: rent a VPS. Use the chooser for which one.
- Already own a Mac mini or mini-PC: run it at home behind a tunnel, and revisit if uptime annoys you.
- Want local models and no API bill: home, and shop for RAM, not hosting.
- Want both reachability and local inference: hybrid, VPS front, home brain.
If you land on "rent", the cheapest sensible boxes are Hetzner for developers and Contabo for 8 GB on a budget; see the full table and the Hetzner guide.
Sources and assumptions
VPS prices from provider pages, 23 Aug 2026. Mac mini second-hand price: typical listing for an M1 8 GB/256 GB in Western Europe, August 2026, ~€350, resale assumed ~€250 two years later. Power draw: Apple's published idle figure for M1 Mac mini (~7 W) plus our own measurement with OpenClaw idle-to-light use (~10 W average). Electricity at €0.18/kWh, a European average; Dutch and German readers will pay more. Raspberry Pi 5 8 GB with official PSU, case and an NVMe hat: ~€110.