I self-host Immich on a personal home server. I do pay for backups, though. For 65GB of images (not a lot) I pay ~$1/mo to Backblaze. The backed-up data is 30% bigger in size right now (= 82GB), as it's incremental.
Which means it's not "painless". The immich part may be, but compared to automatically synchronizing to iCloud or Google Photos, the experience is significantly worse for an average user.
Which means it's not "painless". The immich part may be, but compared to automatically synchronizing to iCloud or Google Photos, the experience is significantly worse for an average user.