This is going to be helpful to many students, but... But the constraints imposed by not being able to pay for third-party services during my years as a student

This is going to be helpful to many students, but... But the constraints imposed by not being able to pay for third-party services during my years as a student have been the main motivator behind tinkering with setting up my own services and finding (FLOSS) alternative solutions to the well-known applications the grown ups were using. I think one has to "suffer" through all the required stages in order to grok all the IT/CS/CSE problems and tradeoffs that exist out there. I also think this suffering is needed to appreciate why these service are good.