I don't fully understand how/why you guys selfhost some apps

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

Because we can. Just because we can.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

It's mostly about syncing data between your different devices, without having to use a cloud service. I want to be able to organize the budget on my PC and look it up on my phone for example, without having to keep my PC running or manually sync them.

Another aspect is backups and redundancy. My NAS has all my data, and it does an encrypted cloud backup every night. I don't have to remember that or make sure it gets the latest changes, because it's always running and always up to date.

It's also just a fun little hobby to tinker with it and figure things out.

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.

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.

For me it's mainly the fun. I'm less privacy minded than other people here but I'm sure that I will be happy to own all my data at some point in time.

For me selfhosting is all about privacy and rights on your data. If you can host it, you are responsible for the data and the only one (theoretically) able to read it.

Data is my answer most of the time. Here are some books recommendations.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Afterlives of Data

Black Box Society

Revolutionary Mathematics

mainly because its my nerdy hobby .

plus i like the feeling of owning my own data

and learning new stuff

​

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

• 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.

Control

What’s your hobby? Football? Yeah I don’t get why you watch that when you could spend an afternoon self-hosting instead…

For example I saw a post asking for recommendation for a "self hosted budget management app"

that's not something I would host on my home server, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an audience.

not everything might be for you!

Basically yes, you can install the app. Where is the data for that app stored? If on the phone, then your data is lost when your phone dies (maybe even when you switch phones). If in the cloud, that's great, but then someone else has your data. Selfhosting is to get the convenience of "the cloud" (multi-device/user sync and sharing) without actually relying on the cloud.

Take Jellyfin/Plex/Emby for example. Yes, you can just connect a laptop with and HDMI cable and play from VLC. Or you can just use an USB stick in the TV and play from the file system. But you have 2 TVs, a tablet, and a phone that all want to watch something from your movie collection. Of course you can just plug this stick into other devices, and use it that way. Or subscribe to Netflix that may or may not have the movie you want to watch. But what if you had your own Netflix that can be used by multiple phones, tvs and tablets, even at the same time? What if it even synced the progress of a series so your TV no.2 knows where you left off on phone no. 4? This is what self hosting is made for. You HOST "Netflix" yourSELF.

Freedom?

Let’s say you’re VM home lab server has reliable backups & snapshots setup.

You treat your PC, phone, tablet as expendable devices. Nothing saved locally, nothing backed up. If your one of your client devices does, they are easily replaced. Because all important data is on your server. Single point of capture, so everything is backed up and safe.

If you’re in that scenario. You’d want to run everything off your home server.

When it comes to budget apps... I haven't found the one that has everything built in. I'd rather build it myself and host it as well.

One thing I haven't seen talked about as much is just the variety of self-hosted applications that might even have paid/enterprise counterparts because the use-case is so extremely niche. Either that or it's only targeted towards big businesses.

Everything from monitoring a homebrewing operation to keeping a full inventory of my possessions can be accomplished with selfhosted apps that may otherwise be subscription based or nonexistent in the paid market.

Lets say you buy groceries but don't have a fridge, your next door neighbor offers to share their fridge as its massive, makes sense. However if you own a fridge, why would you use your neighbors fridge?

Selfhosting can be a desktop app as well, meaning you don't want to use a SaaS product.

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

You can access it from any device (assuming relevant client apps and its over the network)

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 like asking why do you cook your own food at home.

I self host because I know what I am getting, I can control the price I want to pay, and I don't really need to involve other people in my life.

I killed more PCs by stupidly placing my screwdriver (2) than by static discharge (0). And I opened, build and handled like 100 PCs in my 5 years of IT

I mainly host password, private sensible data, and photos on my own home server. That's it.

Selfhosting is a journey of motivation, frustration and learning.
Perks are: Appliable knowledge in the IT space and understanding of virtual concepts be it Software Stacks or Networking interactions, "offline" Data i.E. selfhosted and not under someone elses thumb/control/exposure

Since you have access to all data, you can basically do magic behind closed doors and reap the benefits.

Setting up a selfhosted Environment means you can pipe in offline ressources just aswell as share access to specific entities without handing the keys over to a 3rd party.

In the case of a budget management app - it's finances. Not everybody is cool with having their finances hosted in an app on a device that can crash or get stolen, we'd rather have access to it when we need and want, but still have that data when all my devices used to access it usually are gone.

i.e. when the Service Provider decides to shut down - this one aint. (shot at google)

-

I've started with one ThinClient, then bought two more to cluster them up and experiment with HighAvailability and shared CEPH-Storage between the nodes for 10s Migrations of fullblown VMs.. then bought a Dell Workstation with Two Server CPUs and .. basically virtualized that ProxMox cluster within my ProxMox Baremetal Dell host.

With the knowledge i managed to gather in the last year alone, I'm able to setup a coherent Work Environment for 50+ People with reliable SSO and 2FA mechanisms, shared FAST storage with dedublication of files and continous nightly backups that get checked for validity and automatic pruning of old unneeded backups on - 1 external NAS + Cold Storage on a buddys Datacenter with 20TB of encrypted storage just for me.

-

I basically have no care in the world for the data in my house at this point, since everything's backed up nightly.

I can restore from House fire by setting up a new host with ProxMox, mounting the network storage and restoring the NAS and BackupVM - then just clicking restore on everything..
Since the Services are all on a subnet that's managed virtually by a OPNSense VM and VPN is run on the ProxMox host, everything is drag and drop + Setup your own VPN Solution - if I ever want to gift someone my done work without the data, basically.

-

Why do i NEED this?
To break the spiral of neccessairy skills and knowledge for 'entry level' jobs in technical positions and understanding behind security implications, proper troubleshooting, documentation and service culture i.e. there's so many technologies i'm somehwat familiar with now, that I understand what others in the buisness world need of me to properly process errors, requests, whatever.

For me, it is a balance between what I am trying to accomplish and the time/energy/maintenance I am willing to put into accomplishing that thing.

I used to self-host a personal website on Wordpress, but now I farm that out to a static site hosting provider because I would rather spend the time building the website instead of spending the same time maintaining the hosting.

I self-host a kubernetes homelab environment because that is a personal investment in skill that i don't want to pay exorbitant cloud prices for.

Privacy

Because the government will use my data to train the AI overlords.

Also because i can and enjoy running my own services and infra. Helps me land a better job and expand my skills

Wait, you mean not every one runs a hypervisor at their house with 15 - 20 guest using more technology than most small businesses? 😂

Short answer, it’s just fun!

My primary purpose was to host my own music server. Have tonnes od CDs and what not and ripped them all onto a media server. This then evolved to Navidrome, then Airsonic. It's like having your own, private Spotify. More music you add, woot.

Then, I wanted my DVD/Blueray collection on a server. A simple HTTP server hosts these, and Kodi both accesses them, and offers them up via uPnP for local hosts.

Then there are backups. A small NAS for these. Samba, SFTP, FTPS and even HTTP(s) upload capabilities.

Then using the web server to host some HTML generated from say Cron, to show stats of stuff.

The a logcat server. So everything can log to a central place.

An internal mail server, so local hosts can email their logs to the central logger. Weird some can email, but not syslog.

Then some influxdb to offload metrics from routers and hosts. Then a pretty dashboard from Chronograph and what not.

Everything else after, is just gravy.

This is like asking why no speaks one language saying, " I don't understand how/why people speak different languages."

Tons of reasons, some geographical, some political to some biblical, and other just out of spite.

To answer your statement... Tons of reasons; some listed already but too many to state. I suggest you research more and it'll help you understand why.

Mainly for control and privacy of our data so it doesn’t get stolen or others don’t bank off of selling our data

You don't sound stupid at all!

Before switching to Actual budget, I used YNAB. Just an app to install that works on my phone and on my PC.

It's all synced to the cloud so the same data appears on both devices.

But, I'm tied to YNAB's choices. They decided to increase prices, so I had to find something else.

Instead, Actual is completely controlled by me. None of my data with anyone else, no price, no subscription, no concern that changes will be forced on me that I don't like. It's all in my control.

That's why I would rather self-host a budgeting software than just install one.