Raspberry Pi 5 at $385: what to buy for a home server and VPN
A fully kitted Raspberry Pi 5 now costs about $385. We compare used mini PCs, Intel N100 boxes and VPS for a home server and VPN.
A Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM, fully kitted out with a case, power supply and NVMe drive, now costs about $385. At that price it loses to almost every alternative. For a home server, a used mini PC such as a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny at $100-160 or a new Intel N100 mini PC at $160-250 is the better deal. For a VPN that has to survive censorship, home hardware does not solve the problem at all: you need a server outside the country, and the simplest option is a VPS at $4-6 a month.
Below: where the price tag comes from, what to buy instead for specific jobs, and the catch with each option.
Why does the Raspberry Pi 5 cost $385
The board launched at $60. It got more expensive because of memory. DRAM makers shifted a large share of capacity to HBM and server memory for AI data centers. The ordinary LPDDR4X on a Raspberry Pi became scarce, and its contract prices rose several times over in late 2025 (estimate based on industry reports).
Raspberry Pi Ltd raised official prices more than once, hitting the 8 GB and 16 GB versions hardest. Retailers added their own markup on top, and NVMe drives went up for the same reason: flash memory also moved to the server market.
The board is only part of the bill. To get a proper home server instead of a toy running off a memory card, you buy five or six more items.
| Component | Price, USD (estimate) |
|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 5, 16 GB, retail | 190-210 |
| Official 27 W power supply | 12-15 |
| Case with active cooler | 15-25 |
| M.2 HAT+ for NVMe | 12-15 |
| NVMe SSD 512 GB | 70-90 |
| microSD for boot and recovery | 10-15 |
| Shipping and store markup | 20-30 |
| Total | 330-400 |
The midpoint lands right around $385. And what you get is an ARM computer with a single PCIe 2.0 lane (Gen 3 can be enabled unofficially), no SATA, no second network port and no way to add memory.
What to buy instead of a Raspberry Pi 5 for a home server
Typical home server jobs are modest: Home Assistant, Pi-hole or AdGuard Home, Nextcloud, a Jellyfin media server, a few containers, WireGuard for remote access. There are four sensible alternatives.
| Option | CPU | RAM and storage | Price, USD (estimate) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 5, full kit | Cortex-A76, 4 cores | 16 GB, NVMe 512 GB | 330-400 |
| Raspberry Pi 5, 8 GB, basic kit | Cortex-A76, 4 cores | 8 GB, microSD | 150-180 |
| Used Lenovo M720q / M920q Tiny | Core i5-8500T, 6 cores | 8-16 GB, SSD 256 GB | 100-160 |
| Used HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini, Dell OptiPlex Micro | 8th gen Core i5 | 8-16 GB, SSD 256 GB | 100-170 |
| New Intel N100 / N150 mini PC | 4 x86 cores | 16 GB, SSD 512 GB | 160-250 |
| RK3588 board (Orange Pi 5, Radxa Rock 5) | 8 ARM cores | 8-16 GB, no drive | 130-220 |
Used mini PC: best value for money
Companies retire Lenovo Tiny, HP Mini and Dell Micro office machines in bulk after three to five years of leasing. The used market is full of them, and they cost 2-3 times less than a fully kitted Pi.
What you get: a six-core Core i5 that is roughly 2-3 times faster than a Raspberry Pi 5 in multithreaded work (estimate based on public benchmarks), an M.2 slot for NVMe, often a bay for a 2.5-inch SATA drive, two SO-DIMM slots for 32-64 GB, and a proper Intel gigabit port. The M720q and M920q have a PCIe slot that people use for 2.5 or 10 Gbit network cards.
Plus it is x86. Any Docker image, Proxmox, TrueNAS, even Windows if needed: everything runs without hunting for ARM builds.
The catch: no warranty, the fan may get noisy after five years, the BIOS battery sometimes dies. Fixing that costs $5-10 and half an hour.
New Intel N100 mini PC
If used hardware is not your thing, mini PCs from Beelink, GMKtec, Trigkey and dozens of similar brands on Intel N100 or N150 give you new hardware with a warranty. The N100 performs roughly like a 6th or 7th gen Core i5 while idling at 6-8 W (estimate).
They usually ship with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. The N100 has Quick Sync hardware video acceleration, so Jellyfin transcodes 4K without loading the CPU. The Raspberry Pi 5 has no hardware video encoding at all.
The catch: memory is almost always single-channel and often soldered, SSDs sometimes come from unknown brands. These machines are also getting pricier because of the same memory shortage, just more slowly.
RK3588 boards
The Orange Pi 5 and Radxa Rock 5 have stronger hardware than the Raspberry Pi 5: eight cores, hardware video encoding, and some models have two 2.5 Gbit ports. But software support is much weaker. Fresh Linux kernels and stable images arrive late, documentation is scattered. For someone who does not want to fight firmware, it is a bad trade.
Old laptop
A laptop sitting in a closet is a free server with a built-in UPS called a battery. Downsides: after a couple of years on constant charge the battery swells, and many thin models have no gigabit port.
How much electricity does a home server use
Low power draw was always the main argument for the Raspberry Pi. Let us count how much it actually saves. The rate is $0.15 per kWh, the server runs 24/7.
| Device | Idle, W (estimate) | kWh per year | USD per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe | 3-5 | 26-44 | 4-7 |
| N100 mini PC | 6-8 | 53-70 | 8-11 |
| Lenovo M720q, i5-8500T | 8-12 | 70-105 | 11-16 |
| Old laptop | 10-15 | 88-131 | 13-20 |
| Old ATX desktop | 30-50 | 263-438 | 39-66 |
The gap between a Raspberry Pi 5 and a used Lenovo Tiny is about $7-9 a year. With a purchase price difference of over $200, the electricity savings pay off in 20-30 years. An old full-size desktop is a different story: in three years it burns more money than a mini PC costs.
Without a plug-in power meter you can only estimate real consumption. On Linux, powertop helps, and it also switches off unnecessary power drains:
sudo apt install powertop
sudo powertop --auto-tuneOn Intel mini PCs this usually drops idle draw by 1-3 W (estimate).
Can a home server work as a VPN
These are two different jobs, and people often mix them up.
VPN for remote access to your home
You want to reach your Home Assistant, NAS or cameras from your phone. Any hardware from the tables above handles this. WireGuard is lightweight, and even a Raspberry Pi 5 pushes hundreds of megabits through it.
| Device | WireGuard, Mbit/s (estimate) |
|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 4 | 400-600 |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | 700-900 |
| N100 mini PC | 1000, limited by the port |
| Core i5-8500T | several gigabits |
| VPS with 1 vCPU | 300-800, depends on the host |
For a home connection of 100-500 Mbit any option is overkill. Installing WireGuard and testing speed between two machines looks like this:
sudo apt install wireguard iperf3
# on the server
iperf3 -s
# on the client, through the tunnel
iperf3 -c 10.0.0.1 -t 30The catch here is not the hardware but the ISP. More and more home providers hand out private addresses behind CGNAT. Then you cannot connect to your home server directly from outside, and you need a relay with a public IP, which means a VPS anyway.
VPN for bypassing blocks
Your home server sits in the same country as you. Its traffic leaves through the same ISP, through the same filters. By definition it cannot bypass blocks.
VPN providers serving users in countries with traffic filtering typically run servers in data centers outside those countries rather than on home hardware. There are three reasons: a stable uplink, clean IP addresses, and the ability to swap an address quickly if it gets blocked. In Russia, plain WireGuard is already detected by DPI systems through its distinctive handshake, so routes there need protocols that disguise traffic. CPU power barely matters in this setup: a VPN server on 1 vCPU can handle dozens of users.
So for this job a $385 Raspberry Pi is not needed at all. The same money covers 5-7 years of VPS rental.
When is a VPS simpler than hardware at home
| Parameter | Home mini PC | VPS |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | $100-250 | 0 |
| Monthly | about $1 of electricity (estimate) | $4-6 for 1-2 vCPU, 1-2 GB |
| Public IP | depends on ISP | always |
| Storage | hundreds of GB to TB, cheap | 20-80 GB on basic plans |
| Local network access | direct | only through a tunnel |
| Uptime | depends on power and router | 99.9% SLA at decent hosts |
| Bypassing blocks | no | yes, if the server is abroad |
Among users who build their own infrastructure, a clear pattern emerges. Heavy and private things (photos, media library, backups, smart home) stay at home on a mini PC. Everything that must be reachable from outside and should not depend on the home ISP (VPN, website, bot, monitoring) moves to a VPS. The home server connects to the VPS through a tunnel, and the private IP problem disappears.
VPS has a catch too. The memory shortage hits hosting providers as well: server DDR5 got more expensive, and in 2026 many hosts are raising prices on plans with large RAM. Cheap 1-2 GB VPS plans are holding for now, but that may change.
When does a Raspberry Pi 5 still make sense
The Raspberry Pi did not become bad, it became expensive in its top configuration. There are jobs where it is still the best choice.
You need GPIO and sensors
Weather stations, relay control, camera and sensor projects. Mini PCs have no GPIO header, and USB adapters are clumsy.
You need the smallest, quietest box
A Pi 5 in a passive case fits in a utility cabinet or behind a TV and makes no sound. Mini PCs are quiet too, but they are 3-4 times larger by volume.
4 or 8 GB is enough
Pi-hole, AdGuard Home and Home Assistant without heavy add-ons live in 2-4 GB. The 4 GB and 8 GB Pi 5 versions rose less than the top one, and a basic kit at $120-180 (estimate) is still reasonable. For a single Pi-hole, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W at $15-20 is enough.
The 16 GB plus NVMe configuration at $385 sits at the worst point: more expensive than used x86, slower, and with no memory upgrades.
What to pick for a specific job
| Job | What to buy | Budget, USD (estimate) |
|---|---|---|
| Pi-hole or AdGuard Home | Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W or Pi 5 4 GB | 20-120 |
| Home Assistant | Pi 5 4-8 GB or used Lenovo Tiny | 100-180 |
| Media server with transcoding | N100 mini PC | 160-250 |
| Home NAS, Proxmox, lots of containers | Used Lenovo M720q / M920q with 16-32 GB | 120-200 |
| Access to home from the internet | Any option plus a VPS if behind CGNAT | from $4 a month |
| VPN for bypassing blocks | VPS outside the country or a ready service | $4-6 a month |
People buy a $385 Raspberry Pi 5 out of habit, because for years the Pi was shorthand for a cheap home server. Today retired office mini PCs do that job better for less money, and for a VPN home hardware was unnecessary from the start.