I’ve always been conservative about what kind of services I host because it takes time to get them set up. For example, there’s no reason for me to set up music streaming when I only ever listen to music on my phone and all my music files are already on my phone. On the other hand, it’s a good learning opportunity to set stuff up and have to fix it when it breaks. What do you think?
I spent a lot of time setting up firefly-iii, a really neat and feature-rich finance manager. It’s a really great piece of software by a very responsive and friendly dev but after about 6 weeks I still couldn’t get used to it and ended up going back to paying for YNAB.
I swear by memos now though - highly recommended. It’s like having a private twitter stream where you can send thoughts, notes and files that you want to store/refer back to.
I really liked Firefly III but it doesn’t allow negative budgets, so I’m running Actual Budget now.
How do you like Actual? I set up Fireflyiii as well, but once I read that there is no way to share a ledger, so to speak, it turned me off a bit.
My wife has bookkeeping experience, so something that is a bit closer to double entry bookkeeping would be awesome, since it should fit easily into her quickbooks experience.
Currently looking at akaunting, which seems like it may work, if it is truly self hosted
I’ve been able to make it work for my wife and me. We don’t distribute income as it comes in, so I’m ignoring like half the numbers in the UI, but it’s working.
I’m in the US, so there’s no good self-hosted way to get access to my own financial data, so I’ve got all my credit cards and my bank account emailing me alerts, and then I’m parsing the alerts into Actual. I’ve also got budgets filling automatically using schedules.
I spun up Firefly a few months ago and had about three weeks where I was actively categorizing transactions and reconciling everything and then my ADD kicked in. Really cool tool but I just need something low-maintenance for budget tracking.
If something interests you, set it up. If you find you don’t need it, take it down.
That’s pretty much exactly what I have done. I’ve hosted Plex, and Matrix in the past. Plex I will host in the future but Matrix was too much for me to host on my own, but the experience of setting it up myself was definitely worth it.
I recommend checking out Jellyfin instead of Plex. Open source, fully self hosted.
linkding was one for me. It sounded like a great idea at first, but, I never used it. Shut it down after a couple months.
I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past… but eventually both came unstuck, because:
- SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
- NextCloud - just wasn’t a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn’t that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I’m not using it.
These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I’d had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.
I would rather waste a week setting something up to find I don’t like it, then paying some company to give me some ad riddled thing that phones home every few minutes and being stuck with it for a month, then the nonstop emails after I’ve cancelled and my information being sold to who knows who.
