Self-hosted alternatives to 10 services you still pay for

The more services you self-host, the more interesting the math gets. This is a working list of ten SaaS subscriptions I canceled because a self-hosted alternative was genuinely good enough. Not a comprehensive survey — a list of things I did, with real numbers. Part of the full stack.

The list

Total monthly saving: $77. Annualized: $924. Total one-time effort: about 20 hours of weekend time spread over two months.

The ones worth the most

Immich replacing Google Photos

If your library is big, Google Photos sits somewhere between "annoying" and "expensive." Immich is better at faces now (I benchmarked it at 94.6% accuracy vs. PhotoPrism's 87% on my household library — details in the full comparison). The iOS/Android apps both do background backup. The ecosystem is moving fast.

Vaultwarden replacing 1Password

Vaultwarden is a Rust reimplementation of the Bitwarden server. It's compatible with all official Bitwarden clients. You run the server on your homelab, sync over Tailscale, and never pay for a password manager again. A single container, 10 MB RAM idle. Painless.

The trade: you are now responsible for the backup. If your Vaultwarden server blows up and you have no backup, you have lost your passwords. Back it up. Test the restore. Seriously.

Tailscale exit node replacing NordVPN

Tailscale's --advertise-exit-node flag turns any tailnet device into a VPN exit. Set your home rack as an exit node, flip the toggle on your phone from a cafe, all your traffic now comes out of your home IP. Free. See Tailscale subnet routers and ACLs for the full setup.

Limits: you're limited to exit countries where you have devices. For region-spoofing to watch foreign Netflix, commercial VPNs still win.

The ones that weren't worth it (for me)

Self-hosted email

I tried. Mail-in-a-Box and then Mailcow. Both work. Both require me to maintain DNS records, a reverse-DNS PTR record with my ISP, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, a monitoring script to warn me when I land on a blacklist, and a backup MX. The time I spent was significantly more than my $6/month for Fastmail.

Self-hosted email is the advanced class. If email isn't your primary career interest, outsource it.

Nextcloud as a Dropbox replacement

I ran Nextcloud for 18 months. It works. Every upgrade felt like a bomb disposal. I replaced it with Syncthing for file sync + Immich for photos + a plain SSH-mounted folder for occasional file shares. Smaller surface area, faster, nothing has broken in nine months.

Nextcloud is worth it if you're running a proper small-team setup with shared calendars, document collaboration, and talk. For single-household file sync, Syncthing is the simpler answer.

The mental math I use now

Before I cancel a subscription, I ask: can I maintain the self-hosted replacement with under 2 hours of attention per year?

Most well-packaged self-hosted software (Immich, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, *arr stack) clears that bar comfortably. A few things don't: self-hosted email, analytics at scale, SaaS-quality search over large data. Those stay outsourced.

The list above is not "everything you can self-host." It's "everything I've actually lived with self-hosted for >6 months and felt good about." Stability is the criterion, not feature-for-feature parity.

What I'm trialing now

• Miniflux as my RSS reader, replacing Feedly Premium. 3 weeks in, likely permanent.
• Linkding as my bookmark manager, replacing Raindrop.io. 2 weeks in, likely permanent.
• Karakeep / Hoarder for "read later" + AI-tagging. Experimenting.

If any of those survive six months, they'll join the list.

For the infrastructure these run on: The self-hosting stack I actually use in 2026. For the backup strategy that keeps them recoverable: Borg, Restic, and Kopia.