Re: hours per month of support: as many as you need.

The flexibility comes from, in part, being able to leave. If you don't like our "Nextcloud" do Nextcloud on your own. FOSS gives you that flexibility. If you want customization, Federated isn't the right solution for using FOSS. However, we do include PowerDNS and Traefik in the stack, so you've able to combine Federated Core with lots of additional services run/managed elsewhere.

BTW: a $5 Linode VM would definitely not be able to run all the software included and with the support, the backups, the monitoring for threats, upgrades. Many are not capable of installing and managing Jitsi, just to mention one example, or to optimize it so that it works reliably. Others won't be able to start with step one on that $5 Linode VM. What then for them?

Best wishes.