I’m not affiliated with this in any way but saw it posted at the other place & thought fellow Lemmyzens might like to take a look.
I always find it quite hard to answer “favorite” apps as some infrastructure critical self hosted apps aren’t as sexy as others which sit front & centre so I feel they often don’t seem to get as much credit or attention (such as NGinX/DuckDNS compared to Immich/Jellyfin etc)
Hi everyone,
Like in previous years, I’m running a survey about self-hosting. The focus is on your favorite self-hosted apps, but there are plenty of other (optional) questions too. The top five app lists are free response fields, you don’t have to select the suggestions.
Link to take the survey:
https://survey.deployn.de/s/self-host-2026
More info:
The survey is anonymous. Like last year, results will be published in aggregated form. I’m currently planning to publish them in December.
It takes about 10-25 minutes.
Some of you asked for more questions in the comments. I added a lot at first, then realized it took 45 minutes to fill out properly. So I threw some out again, but there are still quite a few. The survey now has a core section that mainly covers the MVPs (your 5 favorite apps), and you can switch on other modules if you want. Almost every question is optional and can be skipped. If you answer everything at a reasonable pace, it takes around 20 minutes.
The proprietary survey tool caused new problems every year, so last year I switched to HeyForm while the survey was already running. That wasn’t ideal for my purposes either, so this year the survey runs on a new app. It should also make entering your apps faster.
It’s still easier to fill out on a desktop computer.
Thank you in advance for participating.
The several hundred dollars a year and hours spend is definitely worth saving that $14-30/month in subscriptions right? right?
That’s $14 to $30 a month per subscription per user. I’ve got close to a dozen people using mine, most of which can very much not afford those kind of subscriptions.
My wife spent about $130 for a year subscription to a service that she figured would always have her favorite show on it, because they own that show. Then like 10 seasons of it left for an exclusivity deal on another service. This was a contributing factor to pushing me into self hosting. Some of it is saving money, but some of it is also making sure you actually got what you paid for.
Absolutely. I refuse to rely on cloud anything after being bitten too many times: company gets purchased, unstable pricing or service changes/discontinuation, data trapped in someone else’s server, internet or service instability… 100% self hosted is the safer, saner, more predictable option.
Initial cost may be high. But I have calculated that my system. Would cost me 9 euros a month at 12tb of cloud storage. Something that I can’t achieve if I pay for cloud storage to a big man.
What brings me from clouds back to earth is current hard drives prices. Fuck AI.
Right, $14-30/m actually adds up to hundreds and is less reliable.
I know, I know super duper clouds, six nines of availability for cloud services etc., yet github (for example) fails more often then my media/git/file/print server on 10 y.o. laptop with tens of terabytes of media and data, that is less maintened and exists in a far worse conditions (comparison is incorrect but the fact stays).
$14-30/month in subscriptions is $168-360/year.
You likely spend more than that a year on what you host (I know my power alone is going to run higher than that), but the monetary cost doesn’t cover the joys of the hobby, the knowledge aquired, and the fact that your shit still works even after the Internet goes out