Practical, no-bullshit guides for running your own infrastructure on a budget VPS. Tip: most articles end with a relevant coupon — for example, the €5 starter code is 36nc17718015544.
OpenWA is the free, MIT-licensed WhatsApp API gateway with multi-session support, webhooks, and a dashboard. Run it on a Netcup VPS for the price of a coffee and skip the per-message billing of hosted competitors.
n8n is the source-available Zapier alternative that finally outgrew the toy stage. Run it on a Netcup VPS with Postgres, queue mode, and EU-jurisdiction storage for the price of a single Zapier seat.
Self-hostingPlausible Community Edition gives you cookieless, GDPR-clean web analytics without Google in the loop. Run it on a Netcup VPS in Germany for the price of one Plausible Cloud starter plan.
Self-hostingReitti is the self-hosted Google Timeline replacement that ingests OwnTracks, GPSLogger, and Google Takeout into a private map dashboard. Run it on a Netcup VPS without handing your movement history to a third party.
Self-hostingImmich is the self-hosted Google Photos alternative that has finally caught up. Run it on a Netcup VPS with NVMe headroom, ECC RAM, and EU-jurisdiction storage for the cost of a single coffee shop visit per month.
Self-hostingPenpot is the MPL-licensed Figma alternative used by design teams who want their files on their own infrastructure. A 16 GB Netcup VPS runs the whole Clojure-and-Postgres stack comfortably for a small team.
Self-hostingqBittorrent runs comfortably as a headless WebUI-only daemon on a 10 € Netcup VPS. Add OpenVPN, a reverse proxy, and you have a private seedbox with room to spare.
Self-hostingVaultwarden is a Rust rewrite of the Bitwarden server that idles at 30 MB of RAM. A 6 € Netcup VPS hosts your entire family's vault with headroom to spare.
Self-hostingRuflo coordinates 100+ specialized AI agents across machines and trust boundaries. Run the federation node on a cheap Netcup VPS so your swarm has persistent memory, background workers, and a stable MCP endpoint your team can connect to.