Self-Hosted

Vercel’s developer experience is genuinely excellent — push to Git, get a URL, previews for every pull request. The bill is the problem: per-seat pricing plus usage, and it scales with your success. Dokploy is the self-hosted answer that’s been eating that market: an open-source PaaS that gives you the same workflow — Git deploys, automatic HTTPS, preview environments, one-click databases — on a VPS you control, installed with a single command. Here’s the full setup, including the parts the highlight reels skip. ...

The old routine: SSH into the NAS, docker ps. SSH into the app box, docker ps. SSH into the VPS, docker ps. Somewhere in there a container has been crash-looping for three days and you find out from a user, not from your own tooling. Dockhand (Finsys/dockhand, v1.0.54) is the fix: a self-hosted Docker management UI that runs every host you own from one dashboard — containers, Compose stacks, terminals, logs, metrics, GitOps deploys, backups, and vulnerability scans. The multi-host part comes from its companion, the Hawser agent. Here’s the full setup. ...

Quick audit: Netflix, Spotify, iCloud, GitHub Copilot, that domain you meant to cancel, the streaming service you opened twice. Plenty of households report losing $200+/year to subscriptions they forgot about — and the apps that promise to find them want your bank login and $4–12/month for the privilege. Wallos (ellite/wallos, GPL-3.0) is the self-hosted answer: a subscription tracker in one Docker container. Manual entry instead of bank scraping — which is a feature, not a limitation: nothing leaves your hardware, and typing in each subscription is exactly the spending-awareness exercise. Dashboard, statistics, renewal notifications, multi-currency, household members. Let’s put it on the NAS. ...

YNAB is $14.99 a month — $180 a year — for envelope budgeting. That’s a subscription to be told where your own money went. Actual Budget is the open-source clone: same “give every dollar a job” philosophy, local-first so it works offline, and a tiny server that syncs your budget between devices. One container, zero dollars, your data never leaves your network. The math YNAB Actual Budget (self-hosted) Cost $14.99/mo ($180/yr) $0 Budgeting method Envelope Envelope Your data lives YNAB’s cloud Your /data folder Works offline Mostly Yes — local-first Bank sync Built-in, polished US/EU only (see below) Mobile apps Yes Yes (point at your server) The honest trade-off is bank sync — more on that below. Everything else is at parity or better. ...

My monitoring stack used to be five containers: Prometheus, Grafana, node-exporter, cadvisor, and an uptime checker — plus a paid UptimeRobot plan for the “is the house on fire” pings. Total maintenance burden: a weekend to set up, and a Sunday every few months when something in the pipeline silently died. homelab-monitor replaces all of it with one container. Pure Python + Flask, no agents, no Prometheus, no cloud. It does the thing most dashboards skip: per-container GPU/VRAM attribution — which container is actually squatting on your VRAM — plus power-cost tracking, multi-machine monitoring over SSH, and built-in uptime checks with push alerts. ...