# shouldiselfhost.com

> The decision layer for self-hosting. One question per paid SaaS: should I self-host a
> replacement — is it worth my money and my weekends? Verdicts (YES / KINDA / NOT REALLY,
> including honest "keep paying" NOs), real TCO math with break-even dates, machine-verified
> docker-compose files and timed setup logs, community votes and leaderboards.

Ecosystem: canivibecodeit.com answers "can AI rebuild it?", caniselfhostit.com answers "can you
run it, and how?" — we answer "is it worth it?". Capability seed data from caniselfhostit (MIT,
attributed); our decision-layer data is CC BY-SA 4.0.

## Data

- [Full dataset (JSON)](https://shouldiselfhost.com/api/apps.json): every app with verdict,
  economics inputs and derived savings/break-even/Markup Index at $/hr reference rate
- [RSS of verdict changes](https://shouldiselfhost.com/rss.xml)
- [Methodology](https://shouldiselfhost.com/methodology): the rubric, test protocol v1, and why
  votes and sponsors can never touch verdicts

## Scored verdicts (100)

- [1Password](https://shouldiselfhost.com/1password): NOT_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.
- [ActiveCampaign](https://shouldiselfhost.com/activecampaign): KINDA — The email+automation core moves to listmonk (newsletters) or Mautic (drip logic) — but ActiveCampaign is genuinely an automation suite, and Mautic is the ops-heaviest thing in this category. Worth it if your flows are simple; if you live in their journey builder, the migration will hurt.
- [Acuity Scheduling](https://shouldiselfhost.com/acuity-scheduling): YES — Acuity is Squarespace's $20/mo booking page; Cal.com is the same booking page with routing forms and workflows, and we boot-verified it in this repo already. Point your domain at it and stop renting your calendar.
- [Adobe Acrobat](https://shouldiselfhost.com/adobe-acrobat): YES — Stirling-PDF is the whole Acrobat toolbox — merge, split, OCR, compress, redact, sign — behind one port, with no Adobe account and no telemetry. It booted healthy in under two minutes.
- [Adobe Lightroom](https://shouldiselfhost.com/adobe-lightroom): NOT_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.
- [Airtable](https://shouldiselfhost.com/airtable): YES — Grist is the closest thing to a self-hosted Airtable that actually exists: formula columns, linked records, views, API — sqlite-backed, one container. Per-seat pricing dies the day you move.
- [Amplitude](https://shouldiselfhost.com/amplitude): YES — For product analytics at Amplitude's $49+/mo entry point, Matomo (or Countly) covers events, funnels and retention for a VPS share. You lose the fancy cohort AI; you keep the raw events forever without a sampling asterisk.
- [AnyList](https://shouldiselfhost.com/anylist-complete): NOT_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.
- [Asana](https://shouldiselfhost.com/asana): KINDA — OpenProject is the heavyweight that genuinely covers Asana-and-beyond (Gantt, agile boards, time). Its all-in-one container seeds a full Postgres on first boot — this is a real ops commitment for a team tool your whole team depends on. Worth it for seat counts where the invoice stings.
- [Audible](https://shouldiselfhost.com/audible): NOT_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 Backup](https://shouldiselfhost.com/backblaze-personal-backup): NOT_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.
- [Baserow](https://shouldiselfhost.com/baserow-cloud): YES — The cloud plan charges $12/user for the open-source software's hosted convenience. Baserow's all-in-one image (embedded Postgres and Redis) took the longest first boot of this batch but runs itself afterwards.
- [Bitly](https://shouldiselfhost.com/bitly): YES — $10/mo for a URL redirect table is the purest markup on this site. Shlink does the whole job list from SQLite on the smallest box you own.
- [Box](https://shouldiselfhost.com/box-personal-pro): NOT_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.
- [Buffer](https://shouldiselfhost.com/buffer): NOT_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.
- [Calendly](https://shouldiselfhost.com/calendly): KINDA — Cal.com self-hosted does the booking-page job, but it's the heaviest app in our index and the setup is configuration, not compose. Worth it if you're a team with a server habit; a solo calendar link is cheaper to rent.
- [Canny](https://shouldiselfhost.com/canny): YES — Canny wants $99/mo for a feedback board. Fider is a feedback board. It has voting, statuses, comments and SSO, boots with one Postgres, and the entire category is a solved problem.
- [Chatbase](https://shouldiselfhost.com/chatbase): KINDA — Typebot builds the chat flows; your own OpenAI/Anthropic key powers the answers — usually cheaper than Chatbase's $40/mo bundle at moderate volume. It's KINDA because you're not deleting the metered cost, just unbundling it.
- [ChatGPT](https://shouldiselfhost.com/chatgpt): NOT_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.
- [CodeSandbox](https://shouldiselfhost.com/codesandbox): KINDA — code-server puts real VS Code on your VPS and it boots instantly. What it doesn't do is CodeSandbox's instant throwaway environments and live collab. Worth it as your persistent cloud IDE; not a sandbox factory.
- [Confluence](https://shouldiselfhost.com/confluence): KINDA — Per-seat wiki pricing adds up fast, and BookStack/Docmost/XWiki are all credible team wikis. It's KINDA because wiki migrations are where good intentions die — the software moves in an evening, the content and habits take a quarter.
- [Cronitor](https://shouldiselfhost.com/cronitor): NOT_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.
- [Day One](https://shouldiselfhost.com/day-one): KINDA — Memos booted in seconds and journaling in it is genuinely pleasant. But Day One is $6.25/mo and its apps are excellent — the math is thin and this is a category where owning the data is the real argument, not saving money. Worth it if a journal you own outlives any subscription; otherwise keep paying.
- [DeepL Pro](https://shouldiselfhost.com/deepl-pro): KINDA — LibreTranslate gives you an unlimited private translation API for the cost of a beefy-ish container. The honest gap: open models still trail DeepL noticeably on nuance. Worth it for bulk/private pipelines; not if translation quality is customer-facing.
- [DocuSign](https://shouldiselfhost.com/docusign): YES — DocuSeal does signatures, templates, audit trails and email flows from one sqlite-backed container. DocuSign's $15/mo Personal plan caps you at 5 sends a month; your own instance doesn't count.
- [Doodle](https://shouldiselfhost.com/doodle): YES — Rallly does the one Doodle job — find a time that works for everyone — with a clean UI, no ads around your poll, and no $10.95/mo for what is fundamentally a form with dates on it.
- [Dropbox](https://shouldiselfhost.com/dropbox): KINDA — Nextcloud replaces Dropbox and half your Google account — and it's a platform that wants attention. Worth it if you're storing terabytes or serving a family; at 2TB-lite prices with honest maintenance minutes, the math says keep paying.
- [Everand](https://shouldiselfhost.com/everand): NOT_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.
- [Evernote](https://shouldiselfhost.com/evernote): KINDA — Trilium's tree-of-notes beats Evernote for structured thinkers on desktop. The mobile story is a synced web app and the OCR-of-photos job doesn't exist — worth it if your notes live on a keyboard.
- [Fathom Analytics](https://shouldiselfhost.com/fathom-analytics): YES — Fathom charges $15/mo for privacy-friendly analytics; Plausible and Umami are the same promise as software you run. The Plausible compose on this scoreboard is already boot-verified — same replacement, same math, one more subscription that's really a database with a chart on top.
- [Feedly](https://shouldiselfhost.com/feedly): YES — One container, your feeds, no $84/yr for the privilege of reading RSS — the format that was designed to be self-hosted.
- [Figma](https://shouldiselfhost.com/figma): KINDA — Penpot is the real thing — components, prototyping, dev handoff, SVG-native. For solo work and internal tools it's a clean yes. What keeps this at KINDA is everyone else: client files, plugins, and the fact that design collaboration happens where the other designers are.
- [Flickr Pro](https://shouldiselfhost.com/flickr-pro): NOT_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.
- [FreshBooks](https://shouldiselfhost.com/freshbooks): KINDA — Invoice Ninja covers invoicing, expenses and payments credibly, and freelancer money is exactly the money worth keeping. It stays KINDA because books are high-stakes state: migrating history mid-year and owning backups of your invoicing DB is a commitment, not a hobby.
- [Ghost(Pro)](https://shouldiselfhost.com/ghost-pro): YES — It's the same Ghost. $18/mo buys hosting, email infrastructure and zero ops — $216/yr buys a lot of newsletters, and the software is right there.
- [GitHub Copilot](https://shouldiselfhost.com/github-copilot): NOT_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 One](https://shouldiselfhost.com/google-one): NOT_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 Workspace](https://shouldiselfhost.com/google-workspace-business-starter): NOT_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.
- [Grafana Cloud](https://shouldiselfhost.com/grafana-cloud): YES — Grafana OSS is the same dashboards without the per-seat cloud math — the honest catch is that Cloud's bundled Prometheus/Loki storage becomes your problem.
- [Grammarly](https://shouldiselfhost.com/grammarly): KINDA — LanguageTool's server boots in seconds and the browser extension points at it with one setting — grammar and style rules without shipping every keystroke to a cloud. But Grammarly's AI rewrites are genuinely a tier above. Worth it if privacy is the point; not if the AI editor is.
- [Home Assistant Cloud](https://shouldiselfhost.com/home-assistant-cloud): YES — You're already self-hosting Home Assistant — Nabu Casa is a $6.50 relay for remote access and voice. A reverse proxy or Tailscale replaces the relay in an afternoon. Counterpoint worth stating: that subscription is also how HA's development gets funded.
- [Inoreader](https://shouldiselfhost.com/inoreader): YES — Miniflux is 20MB of Go that does the reading part of a $120/yr subscription. Bring your own opinions about minimalism.
- [Instapaper](https://shouldiselfhost.com/instapaper): YES — wallabag archives the full page — not a bookmark, the page — and syncs to its mobile apps and Kobo/Kindle. The $72/yr was for exactly this.
- [Intercom](https://shouldiselfhost.com/intercom): YES — Intercom starts at $35/seat and climbs fast; Chatwoot does the messenger widget, inbox and campaigns without the per-seat meter. Same replacement and evidence as the Zendesk verdict.
- [Jotform](https://shouldiselfhost.com/jotform): YES — Same shape as Typeform: $39/mo for form limits that Formbricks (or LimeSurvey for research-grade needs) removes entirely. The evidence and the compose are shared with the Typeform verdict — it's the same replacement.
- [Kit](https://shouldiselfhost.com/kit): YES — Kit (ConvertKit) at $39/mo for 1k subscribers is the classic listmonk win: campaigns, sequences and segmentation from a two-container setup verified on this scoreboard, plus an SES account measured in cents.
- [Linktree](https://shouldiselfhost.com/linktree): NOT_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.
- [Lokalise](https://shouldiselfhost.com/lokalise): YES — At $144/mo, Lokalise is one of the widest gaps on the whole scoreboard: Weblate and Tolgee are mature, translation-memory-equipped platforms that agencies and open-source projects run in production every day.
- [Mailchimp](https://shouldiselfhost.com/mailchimp): YES — listmonk runs your lists and campaigns for the cost of a Postgres; pair it with SES at ~$0.10/1k emails and Mailchimp's $156/yr becomes a rounding error. Deliverability is now a skill you own.
- [Make](https://shouldiselfhost.com/make): KINDA — Make's $9/mo entry is far cheaper than Zapier, which softens the math — but operations pricing still scales with usage. Worth moving to Activepieces if you're past the starter tier or automating anything sensitive; below that, $9 is hard to beat.
- [Matomo Cloud](https://shouldiselfhost.com/matomo-cloud): YES — It is literally the same software. Matomo Cloud charges $26/mo to run the GPL code they publish; the apache image plus MariaDB is a one-evening setup and the data lands in your database instead of theirs.
- [Microsoft 365 Personal](https://shouldiselfhost.com/microsoft-365-personal): NOT_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.
- [Midjourney](https://shouldiselfhost.com/midjourney): NOT_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.
- [Miro](https://shouldiselfhost.com/miro): KINDA — Excalidraw covers the sketching that most Miro seats actually do, in one tiny container. Worth it if solo or link-sharing files; live multi-cursor rooms need the extra room server and that's where the weekend goes.
- [Monarch Money](https://shouldiselfhost.com/monarch-money): YES — Actual Budget is the best self-hosted budgeting tool ever made: local-first, envelope budgeting, fast sync server. Bank imports work through SimpleFIN Bridge ($1.50/mo) — still 90% cheaper than Monarch.
- [monday.com](https://shouldiselfhost.com/monday-com): KINDA — Same per-seat math and same replacement as Asana: OpenProject (or Leantime for something lighter). The invoice scales with your team; the self-hosted ops cost doesn't. The migration and retraining are the honest price.
- [MyFitnessPal Premium](https://shouldiselfhost.com/myfitnesspal-premium): KINDA — wger handles workouts, routines and body metrics well. The moat is MyFitnessPal's food database — decades of crowd-sourced barcodes that no self-hosted app matches. Worth it for lifters tracking training; not for calorie counters living off the barcode scanner.
- [NordVPN](https://shouldiselfhost.com/nordvpn): NOT_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.
- [Notion](https://shouldiselfhost.com/notion): KINDA — The docs half moves in an evening and the math is per-seat — but Notion's databases and mobile apps don't move at all. Worth it if you write more than you rollup.
- [Obsidian Sync](https://shouldiselfhost.com/obsidian-sync): KINDA — The LiveSync community plugin against your own CouchDB replaces the $5/mo sync — end-to-end encrypted, works well once set up. It's the setup that's fiddly, and $5 also funds Obsidian itself. Worth it if you already run a server; guilt-free either way.
- [PandaDoc](https://shouldiselfhost.com/pandadoc): YES — Same jobs as DocuSign at $35/mo — proposals, sign-offs, templates. DocuSeal (or Documenso) covers the signing core; you assemble proposals in your own docs stack instead of theirs.
- [Perplexity](https://shouldiselfhost.com/perplexity): NOT_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.
- [Pinboard](https://shouldiselfhost.com/pinboard): NOT_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.
- [Pingdom](https://shouldiselfhost.com/pingdom): YES — Uptime Kuma boots in seconds, checks HTTP/TCP/DNS/ping, pages you through ntfy or Telegram, and replaces the entire Pingdom bill. Monitoring your uptime from a box you control is the one recursion self-hosting handles fine — put it on a different provider than what it watches.
- [Pipedrive](https://shouldiselfhost.com/pipedrive): YES — EspoCRM covers pipelines, contacts, activities and email-in for the cost of a MariaDB. It's dated-looking and endlessly capable — which is also a fair description of most CRMs people actually pay for.
- [Plausible Analytics](https://shouldiselfhost.com/plausible): YES — The SaaS and the self-host are the same software — the Community Edition removes the pageview cap and the invoice at once. Margin is thinner than it looks: ClickHouse wants real RAM.
- [QuickBooks Online](https://shouldiselfhost.com/quickbooks-online): NOT_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.
- [Railway](https://shouldiselfhost.com/railway): NOT_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.io](https://shouldiselfhost.com/raindrop): NOT_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.
- [Retool](https://shouldiselfhost.com/retool): YES — Appsmith's all-in-one container builds the same internal CRUD panels Retool charges per-builder-per-month for. First boot is slow (it's carrying its own Mongo); after that it's an app platform you own.
- [Roam Research](https://shouldiselfhost.com/roam-research): YES — Roam still charges $15/mo for backlinked notes. SiYuan and Trilium (verified earlier here) both do blocks, backlinks and graph views locally, and your second brain stops having a landlord.
- [Sentry](https://shouldiselfhost.com/sentry): YES — GlitchTip speaks the Sentry SDK protocol and fits on a normal VPS. Sentry's own self-host wants 16GB and a small ops team — the honest self-host answer is the compatible lightweight, and it breaks even in about two months.
- [Shopify](https://shouldiselfhost.com/shopify): NOT_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.
- [Slab](https://shouldiselfhost.com/slab): KINDA — Slab is a lovely wiki at $6.67/seat; BookStack is a solid wiki at $0/seat. Same honest caveat as Confluence: the tool swap is easy, the knowledge-base migration and team adoption are the actual cost.
- [Slack](https://shouldiselfhost.com/slack): KINDA — Per-seat pricing means the math flips hard around 4 seats — a 10-person team escapes $1,050/yr for one weekend of setup. Worth it if someone genuinely owns the pager; chat is the one service your team notices being down within 90 seconds.
- [Spotify](https://shouldiselfhost.com/spotify): NOT_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.
- [Squarespace](https://shouldiselfhost.com/squarespace): YES — WordPress + a good theme does the Squarespace job for $25/mo less, and it's the most documented software on earth. Keep auto-updates on and the plugin count low — the maintenance minutes assume discipline.
- [Strava](https://shouldiselfhost.com/strava): NOT_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.
- [SurveyMonkey](https://shouldiselfhost.com/surveymonkey): YES — SurveyMonkey's $30/mo Advantage plan is the same job Formbricks does for a database's rent — and LimeSurvey exists when you need academic-grade question logic. Response caps stop being a pricing lever.
- [Sync.com](https://shouldiselfhost.com/sync-com): NOT_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.
- [Tailscale](https://shouldiselfhost.com/tailscale): NOT_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.
- [Todoist](https://shouldiselfhost.com/todoist): YES — Vikunja does lists, projects, labels and sharing in one small container — the $84/yr was for the apps, and the web app plus third-party clients cover enough.
- [Toggl Track](https://shouldiselfhost.com/toggl-track): YES — Kimai is a grown-up time tracker: projects, rates, invoices, per-client exports, team support. The apache image plus MariaDB boots in a coffee break and the per-seat subscription becomes zero.
- [Tolgee](https://shouldiselfhost.com/tolgee-cloud): YES — Same software, different bill: Tolgee's cloud is $49/mo, the container is free and ships an embedded Postgres for exactly this kind of single-box setup. In-context editing works the same pointed at your own instance.
- [ToolJet](https://shouldiselfhost.com/tooljet-cloud): YES — ToolJet publishes the software; the cloud plan charges $79/mo to run it for you. Run the community edition — or Appsmith, same category, whose boot we verified — and keep the builder seats free.
- [Transistor](https://shouldiselfhost.com/transistor-fm): KINDA — Castopod hosts your podcast with analytics, an RSS feed you own, and fediverse comments — and audio bandwidth is modest, so the economics work. It sits at KINDA because Castopod would not boot to healthy on our reference box (port and cache-config maze); until the weekly CI proves a clean install, we won't claim the ≤2h a YES requires.
- [Trello](https://shouldiselfhost.com/trello): KINDA — Wekan does kanban fine (verified boot) and per-seat Trello money is real money for teams. For individuals, Trello's free tier already covers you — don't self-host what's free. Worth it for paying teams comfortable with a plainer board.
- [Typeform](https://shouldiselfhost.com/typeform): YES — Formbricks covers forms, surveys, logic jumps and webhooks with a modern editor. Typeform's $39/mo Basic caps responses; your Postgres doesn't. One app container plus a database and you're collecting.
- [Umami Cloud](https://shouldiselfhost.com/umami-cloud): YES — Same software as the $20/mo cloud, two containers, no event caps. The rare analytics verdict where capability is 100% by construction.
- [Uptime.com](https://shouldiselfhost.com/uptime): YES — Same story as Pingdom, smaller bill: Uptime Kuma covers the checks and the status page in one quick setup (Gatus if you want config-as-code — we verified both). At $7/mo the math is thinner but the effort is so close to zero it still clears the bar.
- [UptimeRobot](https://shouldiselfhost.com/uptimerobot): YES — One container, every monitor type UptimeRobot charges for, and it pays for itself before the second invoice.
- [Vercel](https://shouldiselfhost.com/vercel): KINDA — Coolify (or Dokploy) turns any VPS into your own deploy platform: git-push previews, SSL, one dashboard. Vercel's free tier is generous though — this only pays once you're buying seats or bandwidth. Note: it installs via script, not a single compose file, so our weekly CI covers it differently.
- [Vimeo](https://shouldiselfhost.com/vimeo): KINDA — PeerTube is excellent software, but video is the one medium where bandwidth math bites back: transcodes eat CPU, storage grows forever, and egress on a popular video can exceed the subscription. Worth it for a modest catalog behind your own domain; not for scale.
- [Wanderlog](https://shouldiselfhost.com/wanderlog-pro): NOT_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.
- [Whimsical](https://shouldiselfhost.com/whimsical): YES — Flowcharts go to draw.io (stateless, boots instantly), whiteboards go to Excalidraw (verified earlier on this scoreboard). Two containers replace the $10/seat and both are genuinely pleasant tools.
- [YNAB](https://shouldiselfhost.com/ynab): YES — Actual does zero-based budgeting with your data in a SQLite file you can read, and bank sync via SimpleFIN costs less than one month of YNAB per year.
- [Zapier](https://shouldiselfhost.com/zapier): YES — Activepieces runs your automations on your box with a visual builder and hundreds of pieces. Zapier's task-based pricing means success gets expensive; self-hosted, a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.
- [Zendesk](https://shouldiselfhost.com/zendesk): YES — Chatwoot gives you shared inboxes, live chat widgets, canned responses and automations — the Zendesk core — per agent forever, for the price of a mid VPS. The rails stack is heavier than most on this list; it's still a weekend, not a career.
- [Zight](https://shouldiselfhost.com/zight): NOT_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.
- [Zoom](https://shouldiselfhost.com/zoom): NOT_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.

## All tracked apps (100)

- [1Password](https://shouldiselfhost.com/1password)
- [ActiveCampaign](https://shouldiselfhost.com/activecampaign)
- [Acuity Scheduling](https://shouldiselfhost.com/acuity-scheduling)
- [Adobe Acrobat](https://shouldiselfhost.com/adobe-acrobat)
- [Adobe Lightroom](https://shouldiselfhost.com/adobe-lightroom)
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