Self-Hosted Stack
UptimeRobot's free tier is genuinely fine for basic checks. What you're actually paying for past that is faster check intervals and real status pages — both of which a self-hosted monitor gives you for free, with one ironic catch.
Self-Hosted Stack
For typical small-team file sharing — tens of gigabytes, not a personal 2TB photo archive — Nextcloud fits on the VPS you're probably already running for free. Here's when that math holds and when it stops.
Self-Hosted Stack
Unlike most posts on this site, this isn't really a savings story at small scale — 1Password's team plan is already a flat, cheap rate. Here's where self-hosting a password manager actually pays off, and the security trade-offs you're taking on if you do it.
Self-Hosted Stack
I'm going to be straightforwardly biased here in one way and honest in every other: I run this whole stack on Vultr, but Hetzner is objectively the cheapest option for raw specs. Here's the real comparison, trade-offs included.
Self-Hosted Stack
Pushover is honestly cheap for individuals — $4.99 once, no subscription. The real problem shows up once your homelab is noisy: 10,000 free messages a month sounds like a lot until every workflow, alert, and backup job is pinging you.
Self-Hosted Stack
Every self-hosting post on this site so far has been about renting a small VPS. Here's when buying a physical mini PC and running it at home actually beats that — and when it doesn't, with the real breakeven math.
Self-Hosted Stack
Confluence's per-user pricing looks cheap until your team crosses 10 people and loses the free tier. I moved our internal docs to BookStack on a $6/month VPS instead - here's what it actually costs and where it falls short.
Self-Hosted Stack
Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue plus Stripe fees. Ghost(Pro) charges a flat platform fee instead. Self-hosting Ghost drops the platform fee to whatever your VPS costs. Here's the breakeven math, using this site's own numbers.
Self-Hosted Stack
I added up what I used to pay for Zapier, Datadog, and Notion, then compared it to what I actually pay now running the self-hosted equivalents on one small VPS. Here's the real math.
Self-Hosted Stack
I moved my task tracking off Notion and Asana onto self-hosted Vikunja. Here's what it actually costs, what it can't do yet, and how it holds up day to day.
Self-Hosted Stack
Datadog's per-host pricing adds up fast. Here's what it actually costs to run your own monitoring stack instead, and what you give up.
Self-Hosted Stack
A real cost comparison between Zapier and self-hosted n8n, plus the actual automation I run on it.