HN user
This is very cool! Your readme is intersting and well written - I didn't know I could be so interested in the internals of a full text search engine :)
What was the motivation to kick this project off? Learning or are you using it somehow?
Agreed - Effort/Cost/Time is what always nips my self-host projects out of the gate. I start working down the recursive thought experiment of everything I "need" to get an email server working (for example) and bail when I see the list.
Convincing the family to buy in is hard too because (as you put) I can't promise the same level of redundancy/service guarantees.