Self-Hosted Main

Total control. Let’s take the budgeting app for example. I started using Mint in 2009. There’s more than a decade worth of banking, spending, and investment information in there.

Mint is shuttering in about a month. They gave all their users a month and a half notice. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

When a self hosted app is used (with appropriate backups, orchestration, etc) YOU the user get to decide when you’re done.

If something isn’t working for your life anymore, you can find an alternative and migrate everything over on your own schedule.

"self hosted budget management app". Can't you just install this type of app to your phone or pc? What's the purpose here, will you host it and access it from a browser? Or do you only want to backup its data to your server?

I don't want some third party having access to all of my transaction history and knowing what I spend and where.

I hope I don't sound stupid please enlighten me.

Your question isn't stupid. There is an important decision you need to make on "is the juice worth the squeeze." While you can selfhost a lot of stuff sometimes there's better reasons not to. Email is primary example that gets brought up a lot. Sure you CAN self host it, but for a lot of people on this sub it's not worth the effort required to do so.

Each person has to make that decision for each of the things they choose to self host. Budget apps are no different.

So we retain control over our private data. Do not trust corporations to value me or my data.

When you use a "free" app, you pay with your data.

Thats something a lot of us don't want to. Additionally, it makes fun and is kind of a hobby to build and maintain this stuff.

Can't you just install this type of app to your phone or pc?

Sure, but then the data is, in most cases, not mine. It's shared with some 3rd party. "Free" apps aren't ever free. No such thing as "free". You're always paying with something.

Other than that, it's a hobby. Learning hosting, docker, containers, servers, Linux, etc.

Because we can. Just because we can.

Security. Having your data in your own control instead of blindly trusting companies, where it's more likely than not your data is being sold.

Choice. If there isn't a feature, add it yourself, switch frameworks, change everything if you want, no more "we're working on it" status updates when something isn't working or a feature isn't out. All the options are in your hands.

Pricing. Why pay monthly for "premium features" when you can have the most premium tiers for free. Especially true on anything with storage limits, 1tb of storage drive being cheaper than a few months of 1gb storage on some apps.

Speed. Sometimes it's just more streamlined when there's less bloat and you've hosted the exact thing you need on your subdomain with a single login page between you and the exact page you need. Less interaction needed to get where you're trying to go.

Most of the time it's just a hobby and I enjoy the challenge of solving a "problem" we have at home.

But for payment related stuff, I prefer having control over my own data. Granted I upload encrypted backups to a Google Drive via duplicati for important data - so technically Google still holds my data. But they aren't the ones in control and I have local backups too.

Of course, I don't back up terabytes of media. I'm considering backing up my own rips, harder to find stuff as well as my music (some, I don't even remember where I got it, because it's been on external drives for well over a decade).

An easy reason to self host apps: share media with the household. Sure you can have a samba share and have people browse trough a folder to find the good movie. Or they can load jellyfin or Plex and have a netflix like interface that remembers where you left off and all the fun stuff. You can then add other stuff that will automatically search, download and organize new TV shows episodes for your, etc...

Another reason is some stuff are only possible when hosting. For instance, grocy is an app that lives on a server and manages your stock of food. You can scan goods with your phone and add them to your stock. You can scan them when you throw the can/box etc to say you used it up.

Then it generates a shopping list for you. The nice thing is that it lives on your server, not on your phone. So if more than 1 people do the shopping, you can have a synchronized shopping list, and update it in real time. And the self in self host part is cool because you decide who sees this and no Google or Amazon makes a profile out of your shopping habits.

You can have an online office suite that works in your browser without anyone unauthorized seeing your files.

You can have a bookstack wiki, where you put notes about the house, or whatever you want, and gave it being reachable only by you and people you allow, without a lot of account management.

You can have your own nextcloud, so you have file sync, calendar, etc, without it going at Google or apple. And it is on your server so you can have as much or as little data backup as you want. And often a good fiber line is cheaper than a VPS or a full dedicated server...

With all of this, you can seamlessly switch between multiple computers . You can also manage the loss/destruction of your laptop. Or phone. You can have a local equivalent to Google photos with photoprism.

You can have a frigate server for video surveillance and object recognition, but all in local, your video files don't leave your house. A s it will do local AI stuff.

Last but not least: when you self host your stuff, you can still do a lot when the internet is down. You can replicate services on your laptop if you want. You do whatever you want.

I got sick and tired of throwing my money at unreliable, overpriced hosting solutions, only to discover I could do it at a fraction of the cost at home, and without ever opening a single port to the public.

Mint is probably the largest budget app out there and they just announced that they will be going away at the end of this year. Many of us have years of data in Mint that we are about to lose.

Experience has taught me to avoid depending on third party services for something I could self-host.

Think of it like the difference between renting and owning something. When you rent a home, you do not own it. You don't get to choose. Want a nicer water heater? Not your choice. The owner takes 100% of the responsibility, but often isn't penalized for misbehavior. So they can for instance, decide that they don't like you, and you no longer can use their servers. Or perhaps they dislike other companies, and strip features from the rental agreement. Even worse, all your valuable data, along with everyone else's, is all stored in a single valuable location, becoming a prime target for thieves. I half expect some of the "data breaches" we see are inside jobs, where the company leaves a loophole open, tells the "thieves" about it for a small sum of cash.

I personally like self hosting. Once you get into it, and understand how to reverse proxy, and set up a domain, you can essentially self host anything ridiculously easily. Like, for me, setting up a container, and funneling it into my reverse proxy maybe takes like 30-60 minutes, ironing out bugs and stuff? Sometimes if it's particularly easy, it takes like 5 minutes lol.

So I can backup and move my data as I please. Also means if it's self hosted I can access it from anywhere.

Most if not all apps on phones will require you to sign up and your date is out of your control as it is not hosted by yourself. Plus you are usually limited to doing everything on your phone which is a pita.

Selfhosting is a way of life. I enjoy providing services to myself and my family that I control with the peace of mind of knowing that data stays with me. And it's fun doing it too!

My guess is once you start selfhosting yourself, you'll eventually come to the same conclusions.

However, selfhosting isn't without it's dangers. You have to ensure you have backups of the data. You are also responsible for securing it and you have to maintain your infrastructure as well

After a while, you start to get tired of apps and other online services either disappearing or changing in ways you don’t like.

Open-source self-hosted apps:

1. Free - I don’t have to pay for 100 different subscriptions for crappy SaaSes that never get any meaningful updates and sometimes don’t work at all.

2. Don’t depend on someone else’s infrastructure - my apps are up because I’ve ensured they’re up. Someone screwing up their deployment, which always happens in the worst possible time, doesn’t affect me.

3. Often cost less to run - I have so much stuff stored in my Nextcloud that I would pay the cost of my entire setup for some cloud storage every 1.5-2 years accounting for electricity costs, equipment amortisation and even cloud backups. This point is even more valid when you add your family to it.

4. Sometimes better made - for example Nextcloud macOS and iOS apps are much less buggy than Google Drive on these platforms.

5. Give me full control over my data - for me that primarily means that I’m responsible for backing up and restoring it. I’ve experienced data loss with cloud services multiple times over the last 10 years, now I don’t trust them with my data. I’m perfectly capable of handling it myself.

6. Give me features that the horribly inefficient SaaS businesses cannot afford, like streaming high-res lossless music or compression-free 4K video.

7. Aren’t tied to internet speed, ping, server issues at least while I’m home. Nothing can beat LAN, especially when it’s wired.

8. Aren’t even tied to the company’s developers to some extent - I can fix bugs in open-source apps myself. I can even fork it and modify how I want.

9. Will run forever if I want - any SaaS can be closed at any moment as a business decision. Worst that can happen to FOSS - it gets abandoned. Which is not too bad - I can still run it.

Half of these point only work because I’m a senior software engineer with DevOps experience myself.

Can't you just install this type of app to your phone or pc?

For one instance of app, it's possible to install it onto a single machine.

Things get tricky when you want to access the data from multiple devices. Even trickier, when several people want to access it. After a certain point, it's easier to have a "cloud" solution. And since "cloud" is just somebody's else computer, why not make this a computer YOU own?

Some of it has to do with open source. For example, the budgeting app I use in proprietary and is excellent and I happily pay for it. However if the company went bust or was acquired or something else unfavourable happened, I’d be up a creek without a paddle. At least if it’s open source there’s some hope of it at least not completely disappearing

I'll add that sometimes the self-hosted version does something that the "official, paid"[1] version doesn't, or at the very least allows you to try to hack it together.

A problem with commercial offerings is that their idea of completed product is different than yours, and depending on the feature there's not enough $$$ incentive to pursue it. This is the major problem with Google, because search is such a ocean of income, that no other project will ever stand up to it.

[1] I say official because quite a few of self hosted versions are clones of some paid product.

It’s for that hit of dopamine every time I get an application to work.

What's the purpose here, will you host it and access it from a browser? Or do you only want to backup its data to your server?

I have been online for a long time and seen countless services come and go, often my data goes with them.

So that was my reason for a long time, having my data available and not relying on some third party.

Now, with the emergence of Big Data + AI I've also become a lot more privacy aware. Before I couldn't even imagine why anyone would want to target my data (data mining takes a lot of work to be useful), but now/soon they can just point AI at data dumps and ask it something like "give me a list of X people to exploit, order it by method, chance of success etc etc"

Paranoia? Yes, but suddenly it feels reasonable to be paranoid.

mainly because its my nerdy hobby .

plus i like the feeling of owning my own data

and learning new stuff

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and it also is quite handy to just have a server to test if somthing is usefull to you self

and can sometimes save you a little money .as you can host multiple things on one server

instead of having to pay for multiple comercial services

at the cost of your own time

Because connectivity today matters, namely yes I want an "app" to work on my current device but what if I want to use on another device? Share with family, friends, colleagues or even a random stranger? Then arguably hosting the app with its data is the most logical way.

• easy to use with multiple people
• easier to manage for multiple people
• easier to backup (since you don't need to do backups per device)
• less hassle when you switch personal devices (or reinstall a laptop for ex.)
• You own your data (instead of a mega corp.)
• Less dependent on internet connectivity*, power outages*
• Its a nice challenge
• Its fun (some of us like the self inflicted pain that comes along with it ^sometimes)

*limited to outside factors like how much you actually self host and how much backup power you can store/generate.

Typically if someone wants to self host something like that it's because they want to interact with it using a mobile app.

Without that aspect, you're correct that desktop software would be the more typical way to go.

Using the budgeting example, self hosting would be to provide something like Mint rather than something like QuickBooks.

Self hosted budget management app is like more advanced user stuff rather than the normal users would do. So hosting that kind of things might sound very weird to you, I get that.

But it is more like a tendency. Most users start their homelab with very basic services like storage management, video streaming, photos, or note taking. There is a huge steep learning curve to run all of them safely and robustly, but once you get over it and there is a wide and very flat area you literally can do anything whatever you want.

Budge management app is like that thing. Many of us wouldn't start hosting budge management app, but we will get there eventually. Because we can.

The main advantages for me are learning and data.

For instance, with the budgeting app (Firefly 3) I learned a lot more about banks and the data available to third parties (and myself). I also have a lot of data about my consumption behaviour and I can use excel or AI, if I want, to do clever stuff with my data and take better decisions.

Learning by doing is the main example most people will selfhost things. For example why would you want to solve a puzzle if you can buy it ready made? Why building a statue of lego bricks and not buying the built statue? Because learning about something you like is fun and you gain experience from that which might be beneficial for your present or future job.

Also some consider data privacy more than others. With selfhosting you own your data and not the company behind it. Why should I make an account for a recipe app if I can selfhost it and not needing an account? Why sharing my private information with some random tech company?

There are a lot of things people want to accomplish by selfhosting.

> Can't you just install this type of app to your phone or pc?

The people who make that app, and host the servers that run it, they often like to get paid.

Not necessarily by you. Maybe they'll get paid by Google in exchange to allowing Google to show you ads in their app.

Maybe they sell the app, then, yeah, they're paid by you. Maybe some other thing. Like doing some statistics with everyone's data and selling the results.

Either way, they're working for you, but you're also working for them, in your own way.

Me, I work for myself. That's just how I roll. That's just how many of us roll. We enjoy the idea of being unaffected when the companies that own our services decides to hike its prices up, or punish users with an ad blocker. We like the idea that we'd be unaffected by a nuclear strike on the Silicon Valley, God forbid. We'll be sad and all, but our apps will still run.

because this is the next best thing to Wizardry. I can make something from nothing. Well except for the hardware, thats something, something we all love to tinker with

Budget management app is not someone who starts with, its just oh i got a sever, i use a lot of other self hosted server, why not use a budget manager too.

Now is this better then app? of course!

1. now i can backup my data to 3 place

2. my parter dont need to install anything on there phone to see how much crap i am buying

3. i can automate things with n8n with my finance (i never did, but you can)

etc

Honestly I would say most of it’s just to do it because you can and also because you get experience in doing all these things that can translate to work. I would say I have a lot more container and virtual machine experience than majority of the people at my job and can explain it better than them.

And if you lose your phone, what happens to the data that's in that app if it doesn't sync somewhere?

There's a number of reasons. I would guess for most people here it's really about control of their data, which is a form of privacy. Making sure it stays on their network (ie: in their control) unless they approve it to go somewhere else.

There can be financial reasons (eg: backing up 10s or hundreds of terabytes to the cloud can get expensive), practical reasons (poor Internet access, especially internationally), latency/performance reasons (home automation). Sometimes you'll also get better interoperability with selfhosted stuff since exporting data is usually trivial and there's no walled garden lockin. And that's not everything, just a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head.

But you're right that some of these are often not the case. It can easily become more expensive (depending on how you account for things), it's definitely more work & it's never as easy as "just install and app and create an account".

Finally we can't forget that a not insignificant number of people here are aspiring (or actual) sys admins. This is a GREAT way to learn the trade if that's your thing.

Different reasons.

Main are availability and support for several simultaneous users.

Pi-hole, web server, media server and cloud storage only makes sense when available 24/7 for several users.

My most niche case is installing a VScode server because you can't install VScode on an Amazon Fire and I wanted to do some web design on the train. I can now access a VScode server through the browser anywhere and sync it with Git.

You can host the data and/or the app that can be accessed cross-platform. If you're on someone else's PC be it linux, windows or mac you can pop open a browser and visit a url to access your app with the stored data. Or you could host the data and access it using the clients on multiple/different systems.

Also, cost. If I want 18 TB of data accessible from my phone or someone else’s house, how would you do that and not cost a ton of money? I can repurpose old thin clients and I needed the space anyway, so yeah.

This is going to highly depend on what you hope to achieve with an application.

1. Does the app need more than one person to access it?

2. Does the app need constant up time?

3. Does it make sense to host it?

Really this boils down to how you feel about each of these questions. So your example, the budget software. Yes I can have a single instance of that app on my computer. However I need my wife to have access to it, as she handles the finances.

Another example however is Jellyfin. This is something that is accessed from multiple locations and by multiple people. So today I might be watching a movie while I work. Tomorrow my wife might be doing that. Friday we might have family night. So that needs a server hosted out to actually make sense.

Game servers are another example here. They need constant up time and to be on hardware that is not the machine I am playing the game on.

It is also important to remember that many of us host all of this in a single location that we back up, and also have redundant drives. So we can easily make sure we have copies of our data at any given point. So while yea I can keep all my D&D data and PDF management on my computer, it is easier and more secure to keep and host that on my server where I have a backup and parity running. There plenty of other examples here too like my phone pictures of my daughter or other various bits of data.

Finally, there are things I just want to tinker and play with. I have no reason to host specific things other than to look at what the tech is like. Stable Diffusion is an example here. But my own ChatGPT instance would be useful if only every now and then. Just have to figure out what exactly makes the most sense to you.