And they really hate paying for stuff. Doubly so for things they think are simple and can be done "by myself".

And you wonder why if this is what they get when they pay.

You get to either pay to be a second class citizen at some place controlled by somebody else, or invest a few hours into getting a solution tailored to your use-case that won't bring bad surprises.

So, why would one pay?

Doesn’t mean the niche user base isn’t big enough to support a small scale operation

Think nerd friendly and minimal, like NearlyFreeSpeech is to domain registrars

Good example of a small scale niche service that seems to do well (I think): https://www.tarsnap.com/

Those little already have syncthing for sync and borg/duplicity systems for backup. (With a backend of choice) Why would they use a service that locks then in to one provider?

Same reason they use Dropbox: they don’t want to manage all that