Latest Posts

AFFiNE is the 72,000-star local-first workspace that fuses docs, whiteboards and databases. Here's what it does brilliantly, the self-host walkthrough, and the licensing detail most reviews skip: the editor is MIT, but the backend server is not.

Grafana is the AGPL-3.0 observability platform with 76,000+ stars that queries 150+ data sources from one interface. Here's the self-host walkthrough, the provisioning-as-code workflow that stops dashboard rot, the real costs, and why 'Grafana is free' is only half true.

Actual Budget is the MIT-licensed, local-first envelope budgeting app with 28,000+ stars. Here's how it works, what self-hosting the sync server really costs, why the E2E encryption doesn't cover bank tokens, and where its limits are.

Traefik is the MIT-licensed reverse proxy with 64,000+ stars that discovers your containers and routes to them automatically, with no restart and no hand-edited config. Here's how it works, what the paid tiers really gate, and why debugging it can hurt.

SearXNG is the AGPL-3.0 metasearch engine with 33,000+ stars that queries up to 262 upstream engines without tracking you. Here's how it works, the self-host vs public instance trade-off, the real costs, and why upstream blocking is the one problem you can't configure away.

Meilisearch is the MIT-licensed, Rust-built search engine with 55,000+ stars that ships typo tolerance and sub-50ms results out of the box. Here's why it feels instant, what it really costs, and where its scaling ceiling sits.

Paperless NGX is the GPL-3.0 document management system with 45,000+ stars that OCRs, classifies, and indexes your paperwork entirely on your own hardware. Here's the v3.1.0 pipeline, the real costs, and the clear-text storage trade-off you must plan around.

Supabase is the Apache-2.0, Postgres-first backend platform with 106,000+ stars. Here's how the component model works, why RLS changes where authorization lives, what self-hosting really costs, and the production-hardening the docs insist you do yourself.

Frigate is the MIT-licensed, self-hosted NVR with 31,000+ stars that does real-time AI object detection entirely on your own hardware. Here's how the two-stage pipeline works, what hardware you actually need, the real costs, and the privacy responsibilities that come with it.

changedetection.io is the Apache-2.0, self-hosted web page change monitor with 33,000+ stars. Here's how it works, why your watchlist is a privacy liability on hosted services, the real costs, and the security defaults you must fix before exposing it.

Headscale is the BSD-3-Clause, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server with 41,000+ stars. Here's how it works, what it really costs, where your network metadata lands, and why the maintainers actively discourage running it in Docker.

RustDesk is the AGPL-3.0 remote desktop with 113,000+ stars that replaces TeamViewer and AnyDesk by letting you self-host the relay. Here's how it works, what the Pro tier really gates, where your screen data lands, and the AGPL trap to know before you embed it.

Uptime Kuma is the MIT-licensed, single-container uptime monitor with 89,000+ stars and 90+ alert channels. Here's how it works, what it really costs, where your monitoring data lands, and the single-instance limits you must plan around.

Home Assistant is the local-first, Apache-2.0 smart-home hub with 2,000+ integrations and 90,000+ stars. Here's how it works, what it really costs to run, where your data lands, and who should (and shouldn't) self-host it.

DotCraft is an Apache-2.0, .NET 10 agent harness that anchors an AI agent to a project folder instead of a chat window. Here's how it works, what it costs, and where your data lands — plus an honest look at how young it is.