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.
Hermes Agent is the MIT-licensed self-improving AI agent from Nous Research. Run its gateway on a cheap Netcup VPS so it answers on Telegram around the clock. Coupon codes inside.
MasterDnsVPN tunnels TCP traffic inside ordinary DNS queries to survive heavy censorship. Run the server on a cheap Netcup VPS with port 53 and a domain you control.
Self-hostingOpenWA 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.
Self-hostingHysteria 2 is a QUIC-based proxy that masquerades as ordinary HTTPS traffic. Run it on a 12 € Netcup VPS for a fast, censorship-resistant tunnel you fully control.
Self-hostingDocmost is the open-source wiki and documentation platform that finally feels like Notion without the lock-in. Run it on a Netcup VPS with SSD, ECC RAM, and EU jurisdiction for around 12 € a month.
Self-hostingn8n 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 the EU 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 SSD headroom, ECC RAM, and EU-jurisdiction storage for the cost of a couple of coffee shop visits 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 12 € 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 7 € 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.