For this year I’m considering moving over most of the services I use to become self hosted with either my own software or utilizing open-source software.
I feel that subscribing to third-party services has gotten out of hand. And I feel that there’s a lot of price increases without providing more value I can benefit from. While it might be unrealistic for me to run everything 100% on my own infrastructure, a large portion of what I use could be (at least for personal stuff).
What I validate to determine if it’s worth it:
Cost savings:
As mentioned, I’m subscribing to a large number of services that I pay a lot of money for. Multiple domains and websites, email, office 365, multiple chat apps, multiple AI providers, different API-based services, etc. The list goes on. I just feel like I can group a bunch of these, self host, and only pay for the continued use of domains. We are looking at a spending of hundreds of euros every month that feels completely unnecessary (especially considering some of the services that I barely use, but still need from time to time).
Performance:
When using hosting like Heroku (backend), or web hosting, etc. You normally don’t get a lot of hardware. And on top of that, the hardware that you get is usually shared. So, not only would I get faster hardware, I would have the hardware entirely to myself. Sure, the hardware might be more expensive than a cheap subscription, but that’s a one-time cost (not counting spare parts).
Flexibility:
Running software on my own hardware (or even a VPS), I can pretty much do anything I want and have an infrastructure that adapts to my needs. Question here is, is this flexibility really something I need?
Privacy:
Privacy has always been a big concern for me. The ad-driven platforms have a strong incentive to collect everything they possibly can from users. Even more so now with everyone betting huge on AI (which can’t function or evolve without data). This drives me to a more local-first approach where I am in control.
Maintenance:
Even if I would love to just run the service myself, being naive could cost me a lot of headache. So before migrating, always ask the questions, is there a lot of maintenance? Is it worth the time and effort?
What to migrate?
So then, what are the things that I’m looking at to migrate? Following are some of the more obvious ones.
Web hosting
I can’t get away from paying for domains. But considering the traffic I’m getting, this shouldn’t be an issue to run on my own servers.
Video hosting
I’ve been a Vimeo user for many years. I still like the service for videos that I use for this blog or sharing elsewhere. But I feel I’m paying an expensive price that they keep rising without any added benefits. And with the recent news of Bending Spoons buying Vimeo (they have a pretty nasty history/reputation with the companies they acquire that includes massive layoffs, price hikes, etc), perhaps now it’s time to find something that suits my needs better.
Cloud storage
I’m currently paying for both OneDrive and Apple storage. And I’ve used Google GDrive every now and then. I’m losing trust in Microsoft and their ability to deliver on good software. Apple storage might be harder to replace since I use it for my mobile devices (phone and laptop)—that’s a lock-in problem I’ll need to think through.
Note-taking storage
My current main note-taking app I use cross devices is Anytype. I’m quite happy with it. It’s open source and “local-first” designed. I just need to investigate how the app would communicate with my own DB.
Mastodon instance
Mastodon has been my main social media platform (now alongside Bluesky).
This one I’m still a bit on the fence with. Need to do some more research on it, but from what I’ve read so far, email can be a bit of a pain to self host.
So what’s next?
So in my SaaS/Subscription detox, I will take it in steps. And I will share that journey here on the blog as a new series of posts.
Some of the related subjects I will write about in future posts include security, reliability/uptime, the ongoing costs (besides domains), backup strategy and the time I invest in the project.
So stay tuned for more soon!