Then please update your category name to reflect that. Right now it says “Self-Hosting” which to the majority of readers means hosting it yourself.

As far as I know most Lemmy instances leverages paid-for or freemium services to have their instances work easily/properly

Yes but you can’t compare a whole lemmy instance to an account on an email server that you share with others. The fair comparison would be hosting a lemmy instance to hosting your own email server and creating an account on Proton Mail to creating an account (or a community) on lemmy.world.