Well, that's one of the factors I'm using when going with the Nickel-Iron cells.
I'll put in my thought processes here :
You buy a nickel-iron set - in my case for about $11,000. It takes a fair bit of fiddling to set up correctly , but after that, it's fine. It lasts 20 years overall, with, say, 5 cell replacements due to poor quality control at the factory and rough treatment. So it costs overall $12,000 or so.
You buy a fancy-pants set of Gel-Cells with the same effective capacity at 50% DoD ($22,000 for sungels here). You then use them at wildly varying discharge points, because it's cloudy half the year, and you can't be bothered going out and starting your genset 'cos it's out of fuel/needs an oil change/you're not there. After 5 years and a thousand accidental/necessary 100% DoD's, a few hopeful cell replacements with 'similarly aged' cells, they're out of usable capacity. So you dispose of that set ($$) and buy another set ($22,000). Repeat this for another two times to get to 20 years.
Nickel-Iron set = $12,000 over 20 years.
Lead-Acid set = $88,000 over 20 years.
The difference - $75,000 - buys a lot of fuel for the genset to make up for their inefficient nature. I did roughly do the calcs the other week for topping off with the genset - A 3kVA genset, bulk charge at 60A per string... gives, oh about 8-9 hours of running to pull them up from flat. Fuel consumption of the lister sets is about 3l/hr at 3kVA. 27 litres a run at $2/L (optimistic guesstimate in the future) gives $54 a week. Over 20 years, thats $50,000 in fuel.
But! I could go buy a nice 600W turbine for (guess) $5K and it would (guess) cut my genset runtime in half, making it $25,000 in fuel.
Or I could buy some more panels for $10K and it would do the same thing.
Or I could just learn to use the 'off' switch on a few things around the place. :-D
All of those can offset the lousy efficiency of the cells, and give me more power available as well. And they're certainly cost-effective, if you are prepared to work with their different characteristics.
There's a possibility also that the place might (oh , the horror!) be rented out. You need a bulletproof power system if that's going to happen, otherwise it's going to get real expensive, real quick.