I self host photos, but my backups are cloud hosted. A cold rarely accessed backup is way cheaper and more fungible across providers than an entire photos app.

Yeah that's fair enough. Valid approach, I went away from this due to getting family on my ente plan. I didn't want to be responsible/trusted with their images. This way the images are pretty well protected in ente's infrastructure and we can share in the same platform.

True, I only host my own photos, I don't want to possess anyone else's selfies or family photos for sure