As much as I love tinkering with containers and virtual machines, the enshittification of popular tools was the biggest reason I got into self-hosting my own apps. With most freemium, cloud-based utilities becoming riddled with data-collecting services and paywalled features each passing day, the FOSS ecosystem is the only safe bastion for privacy-conscious folks who don’t want to bleed their wallets with subscription fees. But if you find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer number of open-source tools out there, here’s a quick collection of self-hosted apps that can replace their premium counterparts.

Immich

With enough backups, it’s a solid Google Photos replacement

Google Photos may be really intuitive for the average user, but its paid subscriptions can get really expensive when your image collection starts to require terabytes of storage. Migrating everything to a self-hosted Immich instance can save a lot of money on subscription fees, and you get an intuitive UI that borrows most of the design elements of Google Photos.

Between its massive list of supported file formats, advanced search filters, public sharing facility, hierarchical tags, and automatic album generation, Immich includes all the image management features I can ask for. Plus, Immich also has a robust mobile application that can sync images with my self-hosted instance, and I used a spare Arc A750 GPU to improve its facial recognition algorithms.

That said, I don’t recommend using it as a Google Photos alternative unless you’ve got proper backups in place. Considering that Google Photos’ biggest advantage is being able to recover images once you delete them from your devices, you’ll want a remote node that syncs your Immich data frequently to avoid running into problems if things go south during your server experiments.

Nextcloud

It needs additional apps before it can become battle-ready

On its own, Nextcloud is a decent collaboration platform with a cloud-like interface, where you can upload documents and share them with folks. However, its real utility comes to light when you start equipping it with certain tools in the app store. I consider the Collabora Online and Nextcloud Office apps borderline essential for this private cloud, as they let me create and modify text documents, spreadsheets, and presentation slides. This brings Nextcloud on par with Microsoft 365 and Google Drive for my specific needs, with the added advantage of not paying for external storage or keeping private files on another company’s servers.

Then there’s Nextcloud Calendar to keep track of important events, while its Whiteboard app is great for quickly jotting down notes. It also supports extra apps, including those centered around managing RSS feeds, notes, forms, and cookbooks, so you don’t have to cycle between multiple apps and can organize everything from this all-in-one cloud platform.

Vikunja

A solid FOSS alternative to Todoist

Todoist is often heralded as the best task management utility, and it works well for the most part. Unfortunately, the max limit of five projects on the free version can be restrictive when your schedules and hobbies are as chaotic as mine. Fortunately, Vikunja has all the features I need from a Todoist replacement, and it can even import records from the latter.

For my task management needs, Vikunja lets me create deadlines, recurring tasks, and progress bars, and I can divide assignments into sub-tasks when I need to work on complex projects. It also supports Gantt charts, Kanban boards, lists, and tabular views for my assignments, while its CalDAV support lets me sync my task progress with typical calendar apps.

Vaultwarden

I don’t need cloud services to manage my passwords

I’ll be honest with you: the idea of losing my credentials to a botched server experiment made me stay away from self-hosted password managers for the longest time. But once I realized that most client applications tend to cache the databases locally, I began looking into self-hosted solutions to avoid storing essential passwords on cloud platforms.

Vaultwarden is my favorite tool for the job, as it can safely house my passwords, API keys, TOTP tokens, and private documents without hogging as many system resources as Bitwarden. It can also generate long strings and passphrases, and I can modify the input parameters to further lower the chances of my randomized passwords getting cracked.

Firefly III

Technically, Actual Budget is the YNAB replacement

Just like passwords, I’m not a big fan of uploading my financial documents to cloud-based apps. Worse still, apps like YNAB tend to charge extra money for their bookkeeping services, though I managed to come across two FOSS alternatives to manage finances. I’m currently using Firefly III, which can not only track my monetary transactions but also create detailed charts for my spending habits.

Well, Actual Budget is more of a YNAB replacement than Firefly, as it includes the same zero-budget system as its cloud-based rival. However, I’m not a big fan of how rigid zero-based budgeting can get, and Firefly III’s flexible budgets, piggy banks, and bills are perfect for my bookkeeping needs.

Ollama LLMs

I don’t need ChatGPT anymore

The reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other LLM providers make them perfect for trivializing complex tasks. That's why many productivity-driven services let you harness the APIs from LLM providers for AI-driven tasks. But for my self-hosted setup, local LLMs work incredibly well without breaching my privacy or requiring extra monetary compensation.

Whether it’s questioning my Home Assistant server about a random smart device, generating OCR text via a Paperless-GPT container, analyzing my notes on Open Notebook, or retrieving my notes on Blinko, I can leverage my Ollama-powered LLMs to bolster the processing capabilities of my FOSS application stack.

The upfront costs (and energy rates) of self-hosting are fairly low, too

Although my home lab setup includes a bunch of nodes, I only use a handful of low-power devices for my self-hosting experiments. Besides my Ollama LLMs, every other tool can be run on something as low-power as an N100 mini-PC. If you’ve got a spare GPU, you can use it to self-host a bunch of useful LLMs without investing in flagship cards. Unlike training LLMs, using them for specific tasks causes the power draw to spike in short bursts, and your server will remain idle for the most part.

The only application that requires some level of extra investment is Immich (and Nextcloud if you’re using it to store documents), as you’ll want at least another backup server to avoid losing your images. That said, you can use a simple mini-PC (or even a single-board computer) as the offsite node, arm it with enough HDDs to store important images, and run Tailscale to pair it with your local Immich instance. Even with the extra hardware, your self-hosted setup will be cheaper in the long run.