They tell you if you can.
We tell you if you should.

1PasswordNOT REALLY

Vaultwarden runs beautifully — we timed it — and the math still never breaks even: at $20/h your maintenance minutes cost more than the subscription. The stakes are every password you own; keep paying, or use Bitwarden's free tier.

Adobe LightroomNOT REALLY

PhotoPrism and Immich organize and search photos brilliantly. Neither develops a RAW file. Lightroom's $9.99 plan is an editor with a catalog attached — replace the catalog and you still need the editor, so the subscription survives. Darktable is free and local but it's a different app, not a self-hosted service.

AnyListNOT REALLY

AnyList costs $10 a YEAR. Ten dollars. KitchenOwl and Mealie are lovely, but valuing your setup evening at literally any hourly rate puts break-even past 2030. The purest example of the cheap-subscription pattern on the whole scoreboard.

AudibleNOT REALLY

Audiobookshelf is a gorgeous server for audiobooks you own — and Audible's product is a catalog you don't. Same verdict as Spotify: self-hosting replaces the player, and the player was never the subscription.

Backblaze Personal BackupNOT REALLY

Backrest + restic is excellent software, but 'offsite' means renting storage anyway — and your backup of last resort should not depend on a server you also administer. The math never breaks even; the failure mode is losing everything twice.

BoxNOT REALLY

$7/mo for 100GB with sync apps and zero ops. Seafile and Nextcloud replace the software easily — then you're paying for storage, backups and bandwidth anyway, arriving at roughly the same money with pager duty included. Dropbox got a KINDA at $11.99; Box at $7 doesn't clear the bar.

BufferNOT REALLY

Buffer's $5/channel is cheap, and the real cost of Postiz (fine software) is maintenance: every social network rotates tokens and breaks APIs on their schedule, making your scheduler a part-time job. The subscription outsources exactly the annoying part.

ChatGPTNOT REALLY

LibreChat self-hosts the chat window, not the intelligence. You'll bring API keys (still paying, now per-token) or a GPU whose electricity bill reads like a subscription. The model was the product all along.

CronitorNOT REALLY

Healthchecks is excellent and installs in half an hour. Cronitor's solo tier is $2/mo. If your time is worth anything at all, the subscription wins — and the monitor watching your cron jobs shouldn't share fate with the box running them.

EverandNOT REALLY

Everand is a catalog subscription — the books aren't yours either way. Kavita beautifully serves media you own (and we verified it boots), but it cannot conjure Everand's library. Third member of the catalog-is-the-product pattern, after Spotify and Audible.

Flickr ProNOT REALLY

$6.17/mo for unlimited hosting plus the last real photo community. Piwigo and Immich store photos superbly (Immich already earned an ownership-driven NO here against Google One) — but Flickr Pro is community + hosting, and half of that doesn't self-host.

GitHub CopilotNOT REALLY

Tabby self-hosts code completion competently — on a GPU you have to rent or own. $10/mo buys frontier-model completions; a capable inference GPU runs multiples of that in electricity alone. The math inverts only if idle GPU hardware already exists in your house.

Google OneNOT REALLY

Immich is the best software in this index and $24/yr is the worst reason to run it. A photos server wants real RAM, real storage and real backups — run Immich for ownership and privacy, not to save two dollars a month.

Google WorkspaceNOT REALLY

The docs and drive parts self-host fine (OnlyOffice, Nextcloud — both on this scoreboard). The email part is the trap: self-hosted SMTP in 2026 is a deliverability hobby where you debug why Gmail silently spam-folders your invoices. Email is the one workload we tell everyone to keep paying for.

LinktreeNOT REALLY

It's one page of links. You don't need to self-host an app for that — you need 40 lines of HTML on any static host, free. LinkStack exists and works; recommending a PHP container to replace a static page is how self-hosting gets its reputation.

Microsoft 365 PersonalNOT REALLY

$1.99/mo including 100GB and real Office compatibility. OnlyOffice self-hosts well, but nothing self-hosted opens a tracked-changes .docx from a lawyer with guaranteed fidelity. Keep paying.

MidjourneyNOT REALLY

InvokeAI + open models on your own GPU is a genuine creative stack — for people who own the GPU for other reasons. Renting one to avoid a $10/mo subscription is negative-sum, and Midjourney's model quality is the product anyway. Same GPU-economics pattern as Copilot.

NordVPNNOT REALLY

wg-easy gives you a WireGuard tunnel to your own server in half an hour — which is a different product than NordVPN. Your VPS exit IP is more identifying than your home ISP's, not less. Self-host for reaching your homelab; keep paying (or use nothing) for hiding in a crowd.

PerplexityNOT REALLY

Perplexica reproduces the interface, but every answer still burns metered LLM API tokens on your key. Heavy use costs more à la carte than the $20 bundle; light use doesn't justify the stack. You'd be self-hosting the wrapper while renting the brain.

PinboardNOT REALLY

linkding installs in 25 minutes and runs on a potato. Pinboard costs $22 a YEAR. Five maintenance minutes a month already makes self-hosting the more expensive bookmark box.

QuickBooks OnlineNOT REALLY

The software is replaceable; the accountant isn't. QuickBooks is the file format your CPA speaks, and 'my books are in a self-hosted Akaunting instance' is a sentence that costs you billable hours every April. Keep paying — this lock-in runs through people, not code.

RailwayNOT REALLY

Railway's $5 hobby plan is the VPS. Replacing it with a $5 VPS running Dokploy is a lateral move plus a weekend — you'd be self-hosting the convenience you were paying $0 extra for. Revisit at usage-based scale; at $5, keep paying.

Raindrop.ioNOT REALLY

$3/mo, and the free tier is generous. Linkwarden is a genuinely nice bookmark manager with previews — and the same verdict as linkding applies: at this price your setup evening never pays back. Run it for ownership if you want; the wallet argument isn't there.

ShopifyNOT REALLY

PrestaShop can run a store. But your checkout's uptime is revenue, PCI is real, and Shopify's $5 starter buys a payments-and-fraud team you cannot hire for that money. E-commerce is infrastructure where downtime bills you directly — keep paying.

SpotifyNOT REALLY

Navidrome is a lovely server for music you own — and Spotify's product is music you don't. Self-hosting replaces the player, not the catalog, and the catalog is the subscription.

StravaNOT REALLY

FitTrackee logs your runs beautifully. But Strava at $11.67/mo isn't a GPS log — it's the feed, segments, and the fact that your friends are on it. The network is the product (same pattern as Spotify's catalog), and a self-hosted feed of one is just a diary.

Sync.comNOT REALLY

$4/mo for 2TB of e2e-encrypted storage is cheaper than the raw disk it would take to replicate — before you count your time. Syncthing is superb for device-to-device sync (no server!) and complements rather than replaces a storage subscription.

TailscaleNOT REALLY

For individuals, Tailscale's free tier IS the product — 100 devices, 3 users, $0. Headscale is a superb control-plane replacement, but you'd be self-hosting to avoid a bill that doesn't exist. It earns its place only when team pricing or compliance says the coordination server must be yours.

WanderlogNOT REALLY

$3.33/mo. AdventureLog is a charming trip journal, but Wanderlog's value is collaborative planning with live maps and imports — and the cheap-subscription pattern applies in full: the setup evening costs more than years of the subscription.

ZightNOT REALLY

Zight is a capture app with hosting attached. Zipline hosts files fine, but the screenshot-annotate-share flow lives in the client app — which stays subscription-bound. Self-hosting the storage half of a $9.95 tool solves the cheap half.

ZoomNOT REALLY

Jitsi self-hosts real video calls — and then the calls are only as good as your server's bandwidth, your TURN config, and the day UDP 10000 got blocked. Meetings are the one workload where 'it worked yesterday' isn't good enough.