As a developer I keep an email server, a blog and a few other bits on DO and over the last decade the prices have risen to over £60 a month. I don’t know if that’s currency conversion or what but it’s becoming difficult to justify.
Good luck getting Microsoft and Google to accept emails from your own email server. Even medium sized email providers have issues sometimes.
But for everything else I agree that’s a better solution and getting better by the day, in fact I’m in the process of migrating my nextcloud to a raspberry pi.