A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.
The reason you might want to do this is that it's probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you're away from home.
I just cannot get this working without HTTPS even though it says in the documentation it's not required. I think I'm going with Firefly-iii
Actual has been great for my partner and me. Highly recommend!
What about AdGuard home, set your router to use your server as a DNS and get local network dns with adblocking?
Maybe Pihole/Adguard home?
Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?
I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.
Paperless-ngx - it allows you to upload important documents like receipts, contracts, etc. and uses OCR so you can search them
Snikket is easy to host in a docker container. You would have your own internet messenger for friends and family. Snikket is based on the xmpp protocol thats been around for 20 years, is tried and tested and very lightweight and does take very few resources on your server. things like Nintendo's messenger and WhatsApp are xmpp based).
what is your favorite app for android?
we like conversations, but our phones don't treat it like a regular calling app. navigation and music still play over the conversation phone call.
I'm absolutely loving immich. Definitely check it out. Via Docker compise is a breeze.
I’m already hosting Immich, I feel it was the most painless to set up out of the three. There was a weird error with python modules with radicale and Nextcloud was a bit more complex to set up, but they were all relatively easy to get started with.
I particularly like Immich’s mobile app. I just clicked a few buttons and BOOM all my puotos are backed up (you can even change what albums to include and exclude, and duplicates are automatically removed e.g. if you have the same photo in multiple albums)
Just as a side node, make sure to backup your immich / nextcloud services too.
Run a RocketChat server for me so I don't have to pay $8/mo anymore
But a Pi and recover the cost in under a year.
I would but I prefer a server hosted outside of my country.
That’s fair, though if you’re concerned to that degree I’d say a rando hosting it would be a silly move. That said, I realize that was a joke. ;P
I've been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.
First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you've not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don't want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.
I also recommend Pihole - it's an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It's really improved my experience on all my devices.
Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.
Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.
Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.
Ooh, I didn’t know you could self-host joplin sync! I’ve been using backblaze for quite a long time for that.
I selfhost Anysync for Anytype. In this way I can sync my notes with my family.
What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?
You sound kind of like me, but physical books are not my jam. I host a lot of things I use all the time. The most used app I selfhost is SearxNG. When you get it all set up, in your browser settings you can substitute DDG for your private SearxNG instance.
I host Obsidian which is a note taking app. It houses all my compose files, step by step tuts I've written to myself, interesting code snippets, etc. There are several encryption plugins for Obsidian that allow you to encrypt the document itself to keep it away from nosy people.
I host Readeck and Karakeep. These are bookmark type apps. I use Readeck for 'read it later' type articles I find are interesting. Karakeep I use for data preservation. Both can be used for both bookmarks and data preservation, I just keep 'em separated.
I host a lot more but that might get the juices flowing as it were.
Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.
ooh I might try that then!
Syncthing for files syncing, to replace stuff like OneDrive, Dropbox etc.
I use to sync files between my NAS, laptop, Steam Deck and phone, each with different dirs based on what I need synced there.
Vaultwarden
I personally prefer keepass and really don’t trust my server to be secure enough with all my passwords…
Home Assistant? Maybe a homepage like Heimdall or some other dashboard? Maybe Uptime Kuma to notify you when your services go down? Definately a pihole or adguard home. Biggest quality of life improvement. It's the biggest thing my wife notices and approves of. She audibly groans in disgust when she leaves the LAN on her cellphone and sees all the ads and garbage that had previously been blocked. My pihole dashboard show 70% of the requests are blocked on my LAN. And everything works great.
If she has an Android, you can use the DNS blocker in ReThink to do something similar to pihole outside of your LAN. That's what I use. There are others, but ReThink is pretty good and has lots of other stuff it can do as well, or just use the DNS option.
I’m looking to get started with self hosting too. Could you share the links you used to get yourself set up?
Awesome SelfHosted is a great place to start looking: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.
For Immich, official docs were fantastic!
For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)
Ipfs gateway, Tor gateway
I host a number of alternate frontends. Alexandrite for Lemmy, Redlib for Reddit, Invidious for Youtube. And then I have the Privacy Redirect extension make any links to Reddit or Youtube go to my local.
Ah, that seems pretty cool :D
Is Invidious still working? After the latest round of API patches on Youtube's end, I didn't think it was.
If you're just looking for something to chew up CPU cycles and don't know what to host, consider something like BOINC where you're "self-hosting" (extremely loose term) scientific research, like cancer, new drugs, etc.
Karakeep is fantastic, I know you mentioned it already, but I just wanted to shout it out. The AI tagging is a little gimmicky and pointless, but it's super nice to have a really searchable, automatically organized bookmark manager.
I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.
Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.