That’s a fair take. The pricing model has changed dramatically since I last looked at it, but at the same time, the dev has obviously put a lot of thought into these changes, so I find it difficult to fault him. He’s gotta make a living somehow.

In general, if someone has more than one Proxmox node to manage, chances are they’ve got some type of homelab, which isn’t exactly the cheapest hobby out there to begin with. If XPipe enhances their experience, I’d say that’s worth a few bucks. If not, they can always git gud in the terminal and do the legwork themselves, but time = $, so…

It’s a free tool that is relevant to a lot of users in both of those communities, and because of the support from those communities, the author was able to pivot to working on xPipe full-time. That’s no small feat for a solo dev, and I for one appreciate seeing these updates.

If you decided to devote all your time and energy to a project that was supposed to pay your bills, would you just sit and twiddle your thumbs thinking “if you build it, they will come”? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not sure if it’d fit your use case 100%, but this has been a nice middle ground solution for LE certs in my lab: https://www.certwarden.com/

Apps: SSO via Authentik where I can, unique user/pass combo via Bitwarden where I can’t (or, more realistically, don’t want to).

General infra: Unique RSA keys, sometimes Ed25519

Core infra: Yubikey

This is overkill for most, but I’m a systems engineer with a homelab, so it works well for me.

If you’re wanting to practice good security hygiene, the bare minimum would be using unique cred pairs (or at least unique passwords) per app/service, auto-filled via a proper password manager with a browser extension (like KeePassXC or Bitwarden).

Edit: On the network side, if your goal is to just do some basic internal self-hosting, there’s nothing wrong with keeping your topo mostly flat (with the exception of a separate VLAN for IoT, if applicable). Outside of that, making good use of firewalls will help you keep things pretty tight. The networking rabbit hole is a deep one, not always worth the dive unless you’re truly wanting to learn for the sake of a cert/job/etc.