I priced out self-hosted AI agents on a mini PC and realized I was about to spend my weekend, not save money

I went down a very familiar rabbit hole this week. It started with the classic Reddit take: why pay for hosting when you can run OpenClaw on an old laptop or a mini PC you already own? At first, that sounds efficient. If you already have the hardware, why not turn it into a 24/7 agent box and save money? Then I kept reading threads from people who had actually done it. And the more I looked at the setup, the less this felt like "cheap infrastructure" and the more it felt like "converting cloud s