I don’t have a home server yet but I’m exploring and sometimes I get confused about some posts here.

For example I saw a post asking for recommendation for a “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 hope I don’t sound stupid please enlighten me.

  • @kondorbBEnglish
    2•7 months ago

    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.