deploy-your-own-saas: 149 self-hosted apps instead of subscriptions

There are dozens of "replace the cloud with your own" lists out there, and most of them are dead: links point at repositories whose last commit landed four years ago, and half the projects have moved. Checking each one by hand takes longer than searching from scratch.

This catalogue solved that differently — it handed the checking to a robot.

What is inside

Thirty-seven categories, 149 projects — from VPN and file storage to smart home and personal finance. Inside each category projects are sorted by stars, so whatever has a living community sits on top.

The full list goes wider: mail server, chat, video calls, git server, RSS reader, URL shortener, a Google Docs replacement, backups, GPS tracking, an IFTTT equivalent and a search engine of your own.

The feature that makes this list worth reading

Every row carries two figures: stars, and time since the last update marked with a colour. Green means it was updated this month, amber this year, red more than a year ago.

By our count at the end of August 2026, 106 of the 149 projects had been updated within the month, 17 within the year, and 16 had not been touched in over a year. The catalogue tells you not only what exists but what is alive right now — which is exactly the work you would otherwise do yourself.

How it works — an idea in 130 lines of code

The mechanics are simple and elegant enough to be worth copying. The list does not live in the README but in dyos-db.json. A scheduled GitHub Action does the rest:

1. 1

   The bot walks the repositories

   keep-alive.py hits the GitHub API for each project and pulls stars, last push date and the homepage.

2. 2

   It saves quota with ETags

   Each project stores the ETag from the previous response. When nothing changed, the API answers 304 and the request costs no quota — which is how 149 daily checks fit inside the free allowance.

3. 3

   It regenerates the README

   readme-gen.py rebuilds the tables from JSON, sorts each category by stars and turns dates into human form: 22m, 9d, 7mo, 4y.

4. 4

   It commits itself

   The Action commits the updated JSON and README with a [skip ci] note and goes back to sleep until tomorrow.

Roughly half of the repository's 331 commits were made by that robot. The catalogue stays current without daily human attention — a maintainer is needed only to add something new.

Where to start if you have never self-hosted

Three services that pay off immediately and do not take a week to set up.

1. Immich — phone photos and video, replaces Google Photos
2. Bitwarden — passwords under your own control
3. Jellyfin — a home media library instead of streaming subscriptions

The logic: photos are the most expensive cloud tier in an average household, passwords are the most sensitive to someone else's access, and the media library is the most enjoyable. To be straight about it: we read the catalogue rather than deployed from it, so this is a pick from the activity data, not a report on our own scars.

What we took from it

Not the list — the technique. Our own library is a tools catalogue too, and the cards already show the date we last checked each one. Automatic freshness marks and a page rebuilt from data is exactly where that should go: then "checked" stops being a word somebody typed by hand once.

Who it is for

Anyone tired of paying for five subscriptions who wants to run their own. Owners of a home server who need something else to put on it. And if you build infrastructure for clients, half of the "we need our own Dropbox" requests are answered with a link from this list.

The submission criteria are strict and written down in the issue template: everyday needs only, open source only, only what runs on an ordinary VPS, and no cut-down Community Editions with user limits. There is very little filler inside.