3 apps I self-host that genuinely made my life better

Self-hosting often gets a bad rep for being complicated, and sometimes it is. However, there's a growing number of tools that you can self-host in a weekend that can make a significant impact on your daily life, and help you cancel a few subscriptions while you're at it. From Notion alternatives you can self-host on a weekend to Google Drive alternatives that can run on an old Android phone, there's an entire range of software that's easy to self-host and comes with more benefits than you can count.

This is where these three programs come in: AFFiNE, Copyparty, and Pi-hole. None of them are particularly hard to self-host, and if you've ever self-hosted anything, getting these up and running is a simple matter of typing in a few terminal commands.

AFFiNE replaced half my productivity stack

Notes, docs, and whiteboards—all in one place

I used to be an ardent Notion fan, to the point where I ran my entire life in Notion, and actually stayed organized. But as great as Notion is, it's not perfect, and as I learned later, it's not quite suitable for my workflow. Eventually, I ended up ditching Notion for a self-hosted app, and I'm not going back. The self-hosted app in question is AFFiNE.

AFFiNE caught my attention because while it provides just about every feature Notion does, it's also open-source and completely free to run and use, although there are paid plans if you want to avoid self-hosting. You can host it yourself and avoid betting everything on a closed platform's roadmap. It's also built around a local-first philosophy, which means your data lives on your disk first and can sync to a server for collaboration, instead of the other way around.

It feels natural to move between the doc mode and canvas mode in the same tool. I could outline my day in a structured page and then zoom out into a whiteboard-style view to connect related tasks, add visual notes, or sketch flows without ever leaving the app. The block-based editor makes it easy to rebuild structures like wikis, linked notes, and project dashboards, even if you have to recreate some of them manually.

AFFiNE also officially supports self-hosting, and Docker Compose is the recommended way to do it with an excellent official tutorial that'll get you up and running in less than an hour. Under the hood, the stack is pretty standard for a modern web app: an AFFiNE service, Redis for caching, and PostgreSQL as the database. If you're already running other self-hosted tools, it feels familiar.

Copyparty made file sharing effortless

Fast, local transfers without cloud headaches

I've tried a fair few self-hosted file servers in order to avoid buying a NAS. And while there are some great options around, Copyparty by far is the easiest one to use. It can run on any device, including old Android phones, Linux, Windows, macOS machines, and even a Raspberry Pi if you want.

The entire file server and all its features are compressed into one Python file. Drop the file into the root directory of the drive you want to use, and run it to start the server. That's it. The setup process is as simple as downloading the Copyparty Python script and running it in your terminal.

It doesn't skimp on any features either. You get resumable downloads and uploads, file deduplication, batch renaming, tagging for file organization, built-in media and thumbnail support, and on-the-fly compression. On top of that, Copyparty supports just about every file transfer protocol you'd want to use, including HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, FTP, FTPS, and TFTP.

Data security is handled through a single configuration file where you control everything. You can set up multiple user accounts, fine-tune file permissions using a flag system, and even control access to individual folders. The permission system is a bit old-school, similar to Linux's chmod rather than modern cloud storage solutions, but it's incredibly fast, effective, and easy to understand. Nextcloud didn't expect competition like this, and it shows.

Pi-hole cleaned up my entire network

Ads and trackers blocked for every device at once

Having an extension to block ads in your browser works well enough, but if you want more control over the internet traffic of every device on your home network, you're going to need a tool like Pi-hole.

Pi-hole is a self-hosted, open-source application that acts as a DNS sinkhole for your entire home network. Essentially, it sits between your devices and an upstream DNS server, intercepts every single DNS request going out of your network, and only allows the requests you want.

When a device asks Pi-hole for the IP address of a known ad server or tracking domain, it simply returns nothing, such as a non-routable address like 0.0.0.0, and the request terminates right there. The ad never loads, the tracker never phones home, the telemetry packet doesn't leave your network. It's a rather simple idea, and the reason it works so well is that it operates at the router level, making it significantly more effective than an app or browser extension.

Installation comes down to running a single command. After that, you follow a five-minute interactive setup wizard, and you're essentially good to go. Pi-hole has built-in blocking lists that automatically block the most popular tracking and ad domains. And if that doesn't cut it for you, the community has curated lists you can add as an extra layer.

More control, better privacy, and fewer subscriptions

A knowledge base, a file server, and a DNS-level adblocker, which can do much more. These are the tools that handle a ton of my daily computer activity. I no longer have to worry about Notion's limitations, I no longer have to pay for a cloud storage subscription, and I no longer have to install a dozen extensions on each of my devices to clean up my internet, while gaining more control over what domains my devices can communicate with behind my back.

None of these apps required me to become a system admin and spend a weekend troubleshooting. They each solve specific problems in my daily life, and running them myself means I'm in full control. And that's the part that keeps me coming back to self-hosting—not the technical challenge, but the peace of mind of knowing exactly where my data lives.