The hidden message of the mantra "just self host your own" is that it takes you time to set that up. If you aren't familiar with that process from past experiences, you now have to get those man hours somehow for selfhosting, and suddenly that free self-hosted solution is not so free if you value your time over $0/hr.

That's where I think services should come in. Only with no phoning home crap or cruft, just give me a hosted version of a bare bones cli app that I can access anywhere from any device. Give me my own instance of tiny tiny RSS or something else that's very lightweight and commonly selfhosted for $1 a month, and I'll happily pay up to avoid having to spend a few hours vetting hosting options and setting this up myself.

How does the liscence agreement with Google look like, you just pay per Query? Does Google prohibit caching? Just curious as I remember reading nightmare stories of companies basing their business model on Google services (maps).