A year ago I looked at my recurring charges and decided to try an experiment: for every subscription I paid for, I would ask whether a self-hosted, open-source alternative could do the job — and actually live with the answer for twelve months.
This is the scorecard. Not the triumphant “I saved thousands” version — the honest one, with the failures included, because the failures taught me more.
The setup
Everything runs on a single small home server — an old mini-PC with 16 GB of RAM pulling about 12 watts — plus a cheap VPS for the few things that must survive a home-internet outage. The stack is boring on purpose: Debian stable, Docker Compose, one Caddy reverse proxy, and a nightly restic backup to object storage. Boring is what makes the rest of this story possible.
The wins: five subscriptions gone for good
Cloud photo storage → Immich. The flagship win. Automatic phone backup, face recognition, timeline view — the whole experience I was paying for, running on my own disk. The mobile app is genuinely good. My family uses it without knowing or caring that it’s self-hosted, which is the highest praise infrastructure can earn.
Notes-app premium → Joplin with self-hosted sync. Sync across three devices, markdown, encryption. Migration was an afternoon of exporting and cursing proprietary formats — the export was the hard part, which tells you why these apps charge for sync in the first place.
Password manager family plan → Vaultwarden. The official clients all work against it. Two years of uptime anxiety predictions; zero incidents. The VPS hosts this one — it’s the single service where “my home internet is down” cannot mean “I’m locked out”.
Media streaming (one of three services) → Jellyfin serving media I already own. I didn’t cut all streaming — I’m not writing this from a cabin in the woods — but the “we pay for this to watch one show a year” service died and nobody noticed.
RSS-reader subscription → FreshRSS. Trivial to run, faster than the service it replaced, and reading my own feeds on my own server is philosophically satisfying in a way only RSS people will understand.
The failures: two humbling retreats
Email. I lasted four months self-hosting it. Deliverability is a permanent part-time job: warming an IP, monitoring blocklists, discovering a big provider silently junks your mail. Email is the one service where the network effects of a large provider are worth real money. I went back, wiser and slightly bruised.
Cloud office suite for shared documents. The collaborative-editing options are impressive demos, but the moment non-technical people needed to co-edit a spreadsheet from a school Chromebook, friction won. Some subscriptions buy compatibility with other people’s habits, and no amount of Docker fixes that.
The real accounting
Cash saved: about €35/month against roughly €6 of extra electricity and €5 of VPS and storage. Call it €280 a year net. Nobody gets rich here.
Time spent: heavy in month one (call it twenty hours of setup and migration), then genuinely low — updates are a monthly half-hour ritual, and the backup restore drill (which I actually test, twice a year, because an untested backup is a rumour) adds another hour.
But the accounting that matters isn’t monetary. My photos, notes, passwords and feeds no longer live at the pleasure of a product manager’s roadmap. No surprise price hikes, no features moving behind higher tiers, no service shutting down with ninety days’ notice. The data sits in open formats on hardware I can touch.
Advice for anyone starting
Start with the service whose data you’d miss most if the company vanished — for most people that’s photos. Get backups working before migrating anything. Keep email with a provider. And write down what you build; the you of eighteen months from now, staring at a compose file at midnight, will be grateful.
Self-hosting didn’t make me rich. It made me a tenant of fewer landlords — and after a year, that turns out to be the subscription I most wanted to cancel.