If you run Netdata on one to three machines at home, the local agent dashboard on port 19999 plus the free Netdata Cloud tier covers almost everything you need, and a paid plan rarely earns its keep across three years. Pay only when you need durable multi node views, alert routing that reaches other people, and role based access you can revoke. Self hosting a Netdata parent node is the cheapest route to long retention and one dashboard for every child node, and the price is one always on machine plus a weekend of setup. Bolting Prometheus and Grafana onto Netdata is the most expensive option measured in hours, and it only pays back if you already run that stack for something else.
TL;DR by reader profile:
Solo dev with one box (Marco, one mini PC running 14 containers): stay on the local agent and the free tier, because a single node needs no aggregation layer and the agent already stores its own history.
Solo dev with four to six nodes (Priya, a NAS, two VPS and a spare laptop): build a self hosted parent node, since streaming gives you one dashboard and one retention policy without a per node bill.
Dev who checks metrics from a phone while away (Tomas, on call for his own side project): use the free Cloud tier or a WireGuard tunnel home, because remote reachability is the one thing a local only setup genuinely lacks.
