The reason I wanted to reduce my dependency on iCloud was not mainly the $9.99/month storage bill. It was ownership. My family's photos, videos, contacts, calendars, and other personal data lived on our phones, but the backup and restore path depended on infrastructure I did not control.
iCloud is convenient, and for many people it is the right choice. For deeply personal data — photos, videos, contacts, calendars, and health records — I wanted the backup copy to live on storage I control, not only on a third-party cloud account.
Six months ago I was paying for, and configuring, three separate things to get one outcome: secure access to my own stuff.
- iCloud — $9.99/mo for 2TB so my iPhone could back up Photos, Contacts, and Health data somewhere I could restore from.
- Tailscale — to give my laptops, phones, and home server a private network they could all reach each other on.
- Cloudflare Tunnel — to expose two self-hosted services (a Home Assistant dashboard, a Linkding bookmark manager) to the public internet without opening router ports.
Three accounts, three identity models, three subscriptions, three different dashboards. All to do what felt like one thing — make my stuff securely reachable by me and by people I trust.
I'm a founder of HostAnywhere, so the honest disclosure is that I switched my own stack to our product six months ago to dogfood it hard. This is the retrospective. What worked, what didn't, what I miss, what I don't.
The starting state
Before the switch, my monthly secure-access bill was:
- iCloud 2TB: $9.99/mo
- Tailscale Free tier: $0 (personal use, well under the 100-device limit)
- Cloudflare Tunnel: $0 (Free tier covered me)
Total: ~$10/mo. Three accounts, multiple agents, and three different dashboards.
The work to keep all three running wasn't huge, but it added up. Tailscale upgraded its app, iCloud added some setting I had to re-confirm, Cloudflare's tunnel config drifted because I'd forgotten which tunnel I'd registered for which service. Standard small-time-leaks.
What I replaced
Tailscale → HostAnywhere private mesh. Both run on WireGuard. The migration was install-the-agent, sign-in, devices show up on the dashboard. I ran both side by side for two weeks (they use different network interfaces and don't conflict), verified all my services were reachable, then uninstalled Tailscale.
Cloudflare Tunnel → HostAnywhere public service URLs. Tunnels exposed my services at subdomain.mydomain.com via Cloudflare; HostAnywhere exposes them at subdomain.hostanywhere.io. Same outbound-only model, same valid TLS. I traded my own domain for the hostanywhere.io subdomain, which matters less than I expected because the two services I exposed are personal — I don't care that the URL says "hostanywhere.io" instead of my last name.
iCloud 2TB → HostAnywhere Storage Server + Backups. This was the biggest change. I set up a Storage Server on my home Mac mini (idle most of the time, 4TB of free disk), then invited my wife as a member of my HostAnywhere network so we could share the same Storage Server for both our phones. We both pointed our iPhones at the Storage Server through HostAnywhere's mobile app and turned off iCloud Photos, Contacts, and Calendars sync. Photos, Videos, Contacts, Calendars, and Health data now back up to our Mac mini, end-to-end encrypted, with the decryption key derived on each phone. Apple's servers are no longer in the loop for any of it.
What stayed
Two things stayed on the old stack.
iCloud Mail. I still use the @icloud.com address for old accounts. HostAnywhere doesn't offer email, and I don't want to migrate every Old Account to a new address. I downgraded iCloud to the free 5GB tier and use it only for mail.
Cloudflare DNS and CDN for my actual website. HostAnywhere's public URLs work for personal services that don't need a CDN. For my actual production site (hostanywhere.io itself, ironically), Cloudflare's edge is genuinely useful. Different problem, different tool.
The new monthly cost
- iCloud Mail (Free tier): $0
- HostAnywhere Free tier: $0 (3 members, 10 devices, 3 public services — covers my whole setup)
- Cloudflare (production CDN, not Tunnel): $0 (Free tier covers it)
- Electricity for the Mac mini running 24/7: about $2/mo
Total: ~$2/mo, one account, one app on every device.
That's about $8/mo saved, or close to $100 a year. The single biggest line item is the iCloud subscription disappearing — HostAnywhere's Storage Server and Backups are part of the Free tier, so the moment my phones started backing up to my Mac mini instead of to Apple's servers, the $9.99/mo iCloud bill went with them.
But the cost savings are honestly the smaller win. The bigger one was consolidation. One account. One dashboard. One agent to update. Adding a new device used to mean three separate sign-ins; now it's one.
What's better
A few things I genuinely didn't expect.
We own our content on both ends. Our photos, videos, contacts, calendars, and Health data live on our phones (where they always did) and on a Mac mini under our roof (where they didn't before). No third-party cloud provider in the middle. No risk that a vendor's terms, scanning policies, or retention rules change in a way that affects our ability to access our own files. The data is encrypted on each phone before it leaves; the keys are derived on each phone and never sent off-device. My wife and I are the only people who can decrypt our own backups — not Apple, not me as the host of the Storage Server, not HostAnywhere. That asymmetry is what I really wanted out of the switch.
Access Control rules across my devices and my services in one place. With three tools, the access rules were partitioned: Tailscale controlled device-to-device, Cloudflare controlled who could reach my public URLs, iCloud had its own family-sharing model. Now I have one policy surface for who reaches what — both inside the mesh and on the public services I expose. When my partner needs access to the Home Assistant dashboard, I add one rule. When a contractor needs SSH to the dev box for a week, I add one rule and remove it later. No juggling three different rule systems.
Phone backups I can actually verify. With iCloud, I trusted that my backups worked because the green checkmark in Settings said so. With HostAnywhere's Storage Server, I can see — on the Mac mini that's holding the backups — how many photo blobs are stored, when each phone last synced, what the byte count is. Concrete files I can inspect (encrypted, but inspectable), not a vendor's claim.
One sharing model instead of three. Previously, giving my wife access to a shared service meant adding her to Tailscale, sharing the iCloud Family plan, and not really being able to grant her anything specific on Cloudflare Tunnel. With HostAnywhere, she has one membership in my network and Access Control rules decide what she can reach. Same for any future contractor, family member, or friend.
What's worse
Being honest, because anything else would be marketing.
The 2TB on my Mac mini is finite. iCloud was infinite-feeling at 2TB. My Mac mini has 4TB total, but when my partner and I both back up 200GB of photos and growing, I'm going to need to plan for storage expansion. iCloud just kept billing me; my Mac mini doesn't grow on its own.
Newer product, smaller community. When something obscure breaks, there's no Reddit thread from someone who hit the same problem two years ago. The long-tail "weird Linux config breaks the agent" question is more likely to land on us directly than on someone else's forum. We answer fast — but I miss the community-debugging shortcut you get on a product that's been around for years.
Would I switch back?
No. The consolidation win is bigger than the missing-features pain, and the missing features are on a roadmap with engineering time committed.
Six months ago I had three apps to update, three subscriptions to track, three identity layers to navigate, and three accounts that could lock me out independently. Now I have one. The cost is being on a smaller product, which matters less when the product is the one I'm shipping.
Try it
Try HostAnywhere Free at hostanywhere.io — 10 devices, no credit card. If you're currently paying for Tailscale + Cloudflare Tunnel + iCloud, you can run HostAnywhere side-by-side with all three for a few weeks before committing to switch anything.