milanbuha00

Post-2026-price-hike Spotify and Apple Music costs compared in EUR and USD, with the real per-person math for Duo, Family, and Student plans and why the cheaper option flips by household size.

Two things flip the old advice in 2026: Spotify now has real lossless audio, and Apple Music is cheaper on most tiers. A decision table routing you to the one factor that should decide it, plus links to the full sound-quality, price, and three-way breakdowns.

Spotify Family now costs $21.99/mo. A real cost and maintenance-time comparison against self-hosting Navidrome on hardware you already own, a dedicated Pi, or a cheap cloud VPS -- and when it's actually worth ditching streaming.

A genuine four-way 2026 comparison of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music covering catalog size, lossless/hi-res audio, ecosystem lock-in, and current pricing.

A hands-on Spotify Lossless vs Apple Music Hi-Res Lossless and Dolby Atmos test on wired headphones and a USB DAC, and why Bluetooth listeners hear no difference at all between the two.

I pasted a fresh Postgres password straight into environment: on a new compose file, then stopped with my cursor over git add . That password was about to sit in plain text in a repo I push to self-hosted Gitea, not because I was careless, but because environment: is the path of least resistance.

I edited a Dockerfile, ran docker compose up -d, and the container came back up running the exact same code it had before. No error, no warning, just silence, and a service that looked started but was not the one I had just changed.

I ran docker compose stop expecting the stack to fully disappear. A few seconds later, docker compose ps still listed every container and the default network was still there, nothing had been removed, just stopped.

The power blipped, the host rebooted, and half the homelab stack came back up on its own — the other half just sat there, exited. Every container had a restart: line; they weren't all the same line.

Two containers on the same host could reach each other, and neither one was supposed to. Both had landed on Docker Compose's default bridge network — a network that doesn't ask permission before connecting things.

I ran docker compose down -v to force a clean restart, out of muscle memory from a different project where that flag was harmless. It wasn't harmless here — it deleted a named volume along with the containers.

Every self-hosted apps roundup is an unvetted list with no honest 'skip this one.' Six categories actually tested on a homelab — AI chatbot, music, automation, Reddit, Git, and CI/CD — with real hardware cost and one category that isn't worth it for most people.