Self-Hosting

Self-Hosting Maybe Finance: Open Source Personal Finance Tracker Most personal finance apps want your bank credentials, store your data on their servers, and charge a monthly fee for the privilege. Maybe Finance flips that model — it’s a fully open-source personal finance app you run on your own hardware. Maybe started as a funded fintech startup, pivoted to open source, and eventually archived the project under AGPLv3. The app is feature-complete and actively forked by the community. You get net worth tracking, transaction management, account aggregation, spending breakdowns, and even AI-powered features — all running on your own server with your data never leaving your network. ...

Self-Hosting Teable: Airtable Alternative with PostgreSQL Backend Airtable changed how teams think about databases. A spreadsheet interface on top of a relational database — simple enough for anyone, powerful enough for real workflows. But Airtable’s pricing climbs fast, row limits sting, and your data lives on someone else’s servers. Teable is the open-source answer. It gives you the same spreadsheet-like UI with grid, kanban, form, gallery, and calendar views — all backed by PostgreSQL. Your data stays in a real database you control, with no row limits beyond your hardware. It handles millions of rows without breaking a sweat. ...

Setting Up ZFS on Linux for Home Server Storage If you’re self-hosting anything important — media libraries, documents, photos, databases — your storage layer matters more than any app you run on top of it. A single bit flip, a dying drive, or an accidental rm -rf can wipe out years of data. ZFS was designed to prevent exactly that. It’s a combined filesystem and volume manager that checksums every block, supports snapshots, and can heal corrupted data automatically. Originally built by Sun Microsystems for enterprise servers, it’s now the gold standard for home server storage. ...

The Complete Self-Hosting Security Stack: Fail2Ban + CrowdSec + Authelia Running self-hosted services on the open internet without a security stack is like leaving your front door unlocked in a busy neighborhood. Individual tools help, but real protection comes from layering defenses so each one covers the gaps of the others. This guide builds a complete security stack using three open-source tools: Fail2Ban — reactive log-based banning for brute-force attacks CrowdSec — community-powered threat intelligence and behavioral detection Authelia — authentication portal with single sign-on and multi-factor authentication Together, they give you intrusion prevention, shared threat intelligence, and access control. All running in Docker, all free. ...

The Complete Self-Hosting Security Stack: Fail2Ban + CrowdSec + Authelia Running self-hosted services is great — until someone else discovers them. The moment you expose a port to the internet, bots start probing. Brute-force SSH attempts, credential stuffing on web apps, vulnerability scanners — it never stops. No single tool solves this. You need layers. This guide walks through building a complete security stack using three open-source tools that complement each other perfectly: ...

Linux Server Hardening Checklist for Self-Hosters You spun up a server, installed Docker, and deployed a dozen services. Everything works. But your SSH port is open to the world with password auth, you’re running everything as root, and your firewall is… what firewall? Most self-hosting guides skip security entirely. This one doesn’t. Here’s a practical, ordered checklist to harden your Linux server without breaking the services running on it. Who This Is For Anyone running a self-hosted server — whether it’s a Raspberry Pi on your desk, a mini PC in the closet, or a VPS at Hetzner. You don’t need to be a sysadmin. You just need a terminal and 30 minutes. ...

If your team relies on Slack but you’re tired of message history limits, per-seat pricing, and having your conversations live on someone else’s servers — Mattermost is the answer. It’s an open-source, self-hosted team communication platform that looks and feels like Slack, but runs entirely on your hardware. What is Mattermost? Mattermost is a collaboration platform built for teams that need full control over their communication data. It offers channels, direct messages, threads, file sharing, search, and a plugin ecosystem — all packaged in a modern web interface that’ll feel familiar if you’ve used Slack or Microsoft Teams. ...

Self-Hosting Docmost: Notion Alternative with Real-Time Collaboration If you’ve been looking for a self-hosted replacement for Notion or Confluence that doesn’t feel like it was built in 2010, Docmost is worth your attention. It’s an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation platform with real-time editing, a clean modern UI, and all the features you’d expect from a paid knowledge base tool. What sets Docmost apart from the crowded field of self-hosted wikis is polish. The editor is fast. Real-time collaboration actually works. And it ships with diagram support (Draw.io, Excalidraw, and Mermaid), nested spaces with granular permissions, comments, page history, embeds, and file attachments — all out of the box. ...

Self-Hosting Ente: End-to-End Encrypted Google Photos Alternative Google Photos is convenient. It’s also a privacy nightmare — your photos are scanned, analyzed, and stored on servers you don’t control. If you’ve been looking for a self-hosted alternative that doesn’t sacrifice the features that make cloud photo management actually useful, Ente deserves serious consideration. Ente is a fully open-source, end-to-end encrypted photo storage platform. Every photo is encrypted on your device before it ever touches your server. Not even you (as the server admin) can see the contents of uploaded photos without the user’s encryption keys. It’s been audited by Cure53, one of the most respected cybersecurity firms in the world, along with Symbolic Software for cryptography and Fallible for penetration testing. ...

Self-Hosting Karakeep (formerly Hoarder): AI-Powered Bookmark Manager You find an interesting article on Hacker News. A useful GitHub repo on your phone. A recipe someone shared on Reddit. You tell yourself you’ll read it later — and then it vanishes into the void of browser tabs you’ll never reopen. Karakeep (formerly known as Hoarder) solves this. It’s a self-hosted bookmark manager that saves links, notes, images, and PDFs, then uses AI to automatically tag and categorize everything. Think of it as Pocket meets Linkwarden, but with an AI brain that actually organizes your chaos. ...