Many people have already done the math many, many times, and it always works out to be a lot cheaper to have dense urban areas.

I just moved from a dense urban area to a rural area. Taking everything into account - yes, really - things are unambiguously cheaper here. That’s a common result in the US. If you want to blame a single thing, I’d go with lack of housing supply in cities due to exclusionary zoning, but I hit some other weird figures like municipal water+sewer being more expensive than a well and septic system (again, yes, taking everything into account including construction costs).

It’s worth actually doing the comparisons to see whether car-centric living is a net positive or negative in practice in particular situations. Urban density should be a pure benefit, with economies of scale making everything cheaper. Unfortunately, cities in practice have some downsides that reduce that benefit. One major one is that centralizing services means that it’s more useful to try to get a cut of the cash flowing through the institution, and so some of the gains get siphoned off. As a trivial example, exactly zero percent of car commute expenses go to a bus driver’s union.

I’ve got a couple VPSes, hosting

• Mailcow, because email is identity.
• Asterisk, because phone #s are also identity.
• Matrix-Synapse, for personal messaging even though XMPP is probably better.
• ttrss, even though it’s junk software with a jerk developer.
• A bunch of self-developed web apps

Self hosting email is obnoxious, but it’s also one of the only remnants of the traditional distributed internet that’s still broadly accepted.