I'm also generally on the same boat with you. I'd rather pay for the infrastructure and deploy my own tools on top of that, however with the features some applications provide, it becomes either impossible to replace them, or the time required for maintaining them becomes too much for my life.
People say "Installing your own servers is cool, why don't you do that?". I do that, but for small things. At work, I have a fleet of servers, and managing them is enough. After being able to play with cutting edge stuff, renting a VPS from DO and putting stuff on top of it is neither fun, nor satisfying.
Instead, I diligently select and use services, and offload maintenance of such systems to the provider. Of course I take my backups and take my precautions, but I don't want to manage every service I use.
I personally don't like subscription services mostly, but some subscriptions provide real services which I see worthy, and I happily pay for them. Evernote is one of them.
I would prefer to pay for my storage (or host my own) and have apps use my cloud backend. Every app running cloud server to sync all sorts of things has become too much for me.
I still rock 1Password 7 and use iCloud sync. I’d pay for the app but it’s free. I pay for iCloud storage.
Anyway I might give there new apps a look.