Let Me Ask You Something

Where do your photos live right now?

Probably on Apple or Google servers somewhere. You pay them monthly for the privilege of accessing your own memories. And if you stop paying, or they decide to change the terms, or they get hacked, or they simply shut the service down, your photos are gone or held hostage.

Now where does your music live? Spotify? Your budget? YNAB or MINT? Your password? LastPass. Your files? Dropbox. Your movies and shows? Six different streaming services you pay for separately every single month.

Every piece of digital life is rented. None of it is yours anymore.

That is the problem self-hosting solves.

So What Is Self-Hosting?

Self-hosting simply means running software on hardware you own and control instead of paying a company to run it for you.

That is it.

Instead of paying Apple $9.99 for storage for your photos on their servers, you run a photo app on a small computer in your home. Your photos live on your hard drive. You access them from any device. No monthly fee. No corporation with access to your memories. No price increases.

The software exists. It is free. It is open source. Millions of people are already doing this. They just are not talking about it loudly enough.

What Can You Actually Self-Host?

More than you think. Here is what I personally run today:

Photos Instead of paying Apple for cloud storage I run Immich on my own hardware. It looks and works almost identically to Google Photos. Face recognition, albums, shared libraries, mobile app. Everything. Cost per month after setup: $0.

Media Instead of juggling Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and Max I run Plex or Jellyfin. My own media server. My own library. For media I already own. Accessible from any device anywhere. No subscription. No content getting pulled without warning. No ads.

Budget and Finance Instead of YNAB that was costing me $14.99 a month, I run Actual Budget on my own server. Same envelope budgeting methodology or normal tracking budget (can be changed in settings). Full control over my financial data. No company storing my income and spending habits. Free.

Passwords Instead of LastPass or 1Password I run Vaultwarden which is a self-hosted password manager fully compatible with the Bitwarden app. All my passwords on my own server. No breach risk from a third party company. No subscription.

Ad Blocking Instead of paying for ad-free tiers across multiple services I run Pi-hole on my network. It blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level for every single device on my home network simultaneously. Your phone, your laptop, your TV, your kids’ tablets. All of them. No ads. No trackers. Free.

AI Instead of paying for ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro I run Open WebUI on my own hardware connected to local AI models that use my GPU. My conversations never leave my network. No subscription. No data harvesting. $0.

But Is This Complicated?

Honest answer: it could be. But it does not have to be as hard as you think.

Self-hosting does require some technical comfort. You will need to navigate a Linux file system, run commands in a terminal, and troubleshoot when something does not work the way you expected. That is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But you do not need to be a developer. You do not need a computer science degree. You need patience, a willingness to learn, and the ability to follow instructions carefully and understand them.

Most self-hosted software today ships with straightforward setup processes. You install Docker, which is an isolated container that runs apps cleanly and consistently. The community has spent years making this more accessible.

I am going to walk you through every single step in this series. Linux basics. Docker. And then your first real replacement. From scratch. Assuming you know nothing going in.

What Does It Actually Cost

There are real costs.

Hardware: A Raspberry PI 5 costs around $100 one time. A used mini PC costs $150-$200 one time. An old laptop, desktop computer, or a virtual machine (VM) costs $0.

Electricity: Depending on your hardware running 24/7 you could expect to pay anywhere from $5 to $20 per month in electricity depending on rates.

Your Time: The initial setup takes hours. After that, maintenance is minimal or automated.

That is it. One time hardware cost plus a few dollars a month in electricity.

Compare that to what you are paying now.

What Self-Hosting Is Not

Before you get too excited let me be straight with you.

It is not a magic button. There is a learning curve. The first time you set something up it will take longer than you expect. You will probably break something. That is not a failure, that is how this works. Every person who self-hosts today broke something to get there.

It is not for people who want zero effort. That is exactly what the corporations are counting on. Convenience is the product they are selling you and they know most people will pay almost anything to avoid friction. If you want someone else to handle everything, that is a valid choice. Just know what it costs you.

It is not a replacement for everything. Some things are genuinely hard or impossible to self-host right now. Live sports (unless over-the-air antenna). Certain streaming exclusives. Email (can be done, but I hear it is difficult to maintain).

You may pay for some services and that is completely fine. The goal is not zero subscriptions at any cost. The goal is choice. Paying for what you actually want to pay for instead of what you have no alternative to.

There is a difference between choosing to pay for something and having no other option. Self-hosting gives you the choice.

Why Now

Why not now?

Corporations continue to raise prices far beyond inflation while everyday people effectively make less and less. It is not just subscriptions. Everyday living expenses are climbing. And subscription culture keeps advancing into areas nobody predicted. Ink cartridges. Car seat heaters. Software that used to ship once and work forever now requires a monthly fee to function.

The era of owning your stuff is declining right in front of us. And most people are just watching it happen.

Every year you wait is another year of paying for access to things that could be yours permanently.

The time to start is not when it gets easier. It is already easier than it has ever been.

The time to start is now.

What Is Coming Next

Next issue we will start from the beginning. Setting up Linux on whatever hardware you have, physical or virtual. No experience needed. I will walk you through every step.

After that we will cover Docker and Docker Compose, the engine that powers everything we build here.

Then your first real replacement. We will start with where most people start. Media. How to take the media you already own, Blu-rays, digital files, box sets, and load them to a drive you control and host an application you can access from your TV, phone, tablet, and computer whether you are home or away.

If you are not subscribed yet, do it now. This is where it gets practical.

Subscribe now

Corporations count on you not noticing the incremental increases. I am here to help you notice.

Let us take back control.

Your Data, Your Rules publishes every two weeks. Free subscribers get every post. Paid subscribers get the detailed step-by-step setup guides and docker configs.

Affiliate Disclosure This post contains affiliate links to products I personally use or would recommend. If you purchase through these links I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend hardware and material I would buy myself.

The Problem

I spend my days at work finding ways to cut costs and increase margins. It is literally my job. I have done it for companies for years.

At some point I started reading about financial independence. The Simple Path to Wealth. The idea that the gap between what you earn and what you spend is the only number that actually matters. That every dollar you stop sending to someone else is a dollar working for you instead.

So I did what I do at work. I opened a spreadsheet and actually looked at where my money was going.

The subscriptions line stopped me cold.

Not one big number. A hundred small ones. $17.99 here. $37.95 there. $9.99 for something I used twice a month. Each one felt reasonable on its own. Together they were bleeding me out slowly and I had just never looked at the total.

Over $130 a month. Over $1,600 a year. Gone. Automatically. To companies that would raise prices next year and the year after that, quietly, counting on me not to notice.

I noticed.

The Math Does Not Lie

Corporations will tell you price increases are necessary. Rising costs. Inflation. The cost of doing business.

Fine. Let’s use their logic.

If Netflix had only raised prices in line with inflation, their standard plan would cost $11.93 today. Not $17.99.

That $6.06 difference per month does not sound like much. That is $72.72 a year. On one service. Multiply that across every subscription you pay for and you start to see what is actually happening.

Now consider this. The median American household earned $57,739 in 2010. Today that same household earns around $76,550. That is 33% increase in income over 16 years.

Netflix raised their prices 125% over the same period.

Your paycheck went up by a third. Their price went up by more than double. And Netflix is just one subscription. Every service on your monthly statement is running the same playbook. Raise prices faster than wages. Count on inertia to keep you subscribed. Repeat every year.

The math was never in your favor.

What I Tried First

The obvious move was to cancel.

So I did. Went through everything, cut what I could, downgraded what I couldn’t. Dropped the premium tiers. Switched to ad supported plans. Told myself the ads were fine.

They were not fine.

Then came the bundling phase. If I drop Netflix maybe I pick up something cheaper. Sling TV was around. There were bundles to get this streaming service and that one together for a deal. I spent more time researching alternatives than I care to admit, bouncing from one service to another trying to find the right combination that cost less but gave me everything I wanted.

It never worked out that way.

Drop one, pick up another. Downgrade one, upgrade something else. The total number barely moved. And the ads. The constant ads on the cheaper tiers made me realize these companies had figured out how to charge me twice. Once with my money and once with my attention.

The problem was not which subscriptions I had. The problem was that I was still playing their game.

Swapping one corporation for another was not the answer. Getting off the board entirely was.

The Turning Point

Like a lot of you, I bought into the cut the cord movement back when it started. Saved my family over a hundred dollars a month ditching cable. It felt like winning.

But capitalism did what capitalism does. More companies saw the opportunity and jumped in. Netflix. Hulu. Disney. Max. Peacock. Apple TV. Before long we were right back to spending the same or more than we ever did on cable.

We traded one problem for the same problem with a different logo.

I was already deep in the financial independence mindset at this point. Reading everything I could about reducing expenses, increasing the gap between what I earned and what I spent. And I kept coming back to the same question; why am I paying monthly for access to things that could just live on my own hardware?

I started digging.

Turns out there is an entire world of free, open source software built specifically to replace the tools we pay corporations for every month. Photo libraries. Media servers. Budget apps. Password managers. All of it. Running on hardware you own. Answering to nobody.

That was the moment everything changed.

What I Did Differently

I started where most people start. Media.

Plex was the first thing I set up. The idea was simple: take everything I owned, DVDs, digital purchases scattered across platforms, convert them to a format I could store and stream myself, and stop paying for the privilege of watching content I already owned.

Media was actually the easy part.

Finding a home for my family photos was a different story entirely.

I tried Nextcloud first. It worked, sort of, but never the way I actually wanted it to. Photo management felt clunky. Sharing was frustrating. But I had committed and made the mistake of enabling Nextcloud’s encryption on my photo library.

Then Nextcloud stopped loading.

150,000 family photos. Encrypted. Locked behind a service I could not get back into.

I spent days tracking down a bash script that could decrypt the files using the encryption keys I had saved. Luckily I had those keys. Luckily the script existed. Luckily it worked. But that experience taught me something I have never forgotten: encryption without a clear recovery path is just a more stressful way to lose your data. And always backup your data in multiple places, especially the critical stuff.

I tried other photo platforms after that. None of them felt right. Too slow, too limited, too clunky. For years my photos were in a kind of limbo, technically safe, never quite where I wanted them and thus just lived on Apple’s servers.

Meanwhile the media server kept growing. Plex. Tautulli for monitoring. The hardware kept evolving too. Started on a Raspberry Pi, not enough power. Moved to a Synology NAS, still not enough power. Eventually built my own machine with a cheap GPU that could handle transcoding and external streaming. Got everything stable on Unraid and ran it that way for a long time.

Then an update broke something. Or I broke something moving app data, honestly still not sure which. Could not load the Unraid UI without going into recovery mode. Spent hours trying to fix it. Could not. Made peace with it, confirmed my data was safe on the drives, and rebuilt everything from scratch on Fedora Server.

This time with Docker Compose for everything. This time without encrypting my data at the filesystem level. This time with proper backups.

Right before my Unraid server failed, I found Immich.

It was the photo management solution I had been looking for the entire time. Fast. Beautiful. Face recognition. Mobile app that actually works. I had actually been running it on Unraid before everything broke, so when I rebuilt I restored from my Immich backups, spun up a new Docker Compose file, and it came back exactly as it was. Which I will not lie, was a shock to me.

150,000 photos. Home. Finally.

After that the stack grew from the first two to many more items over time:

• Media streaming: Plex (would consider Jellyfin for new setups, fully open source unlike Plex, but Plex still is easier and has a nice mobile app)

• Photos: Immich - see their demo site to understand why I stayed

• Budget: Actual Budget replacing YNAB

• Passwords: Vaultwarden

• File storage: my own SMB share

• Tailscale: for accessing my data outside my home

One by one. On hardware I own. Answering to nobody.

It took years of tinkering. Breaking things. Rebuilding. Learning. I am still learning.

That is the part the polished tutorials leave out. Self-hosting is not a one afternoon project. It is a practice. It can be a rabbit hole. And every time something breaks you understand the whole system a little better than you did before. But I would not go back. Knowing what I know now, and having found the self-hosting community along the way, there is no version of me that returns to renting my digital life.

Where I Am Now

My server runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in my home. Fedora Server. Docker Compose. Stable. The same stack I rebuilt from scratch after Unraid broke, now running better than it ever did on Unraid. I have nothing against Unraid it was great and served me well, but I am happier with my current setup.

My photos are home. All 150,000+ of them. No longer hostage to Apple’s servers or locked behind a broken Nextcloud encryption nightmare. Just sitting on drives I own, backed up properly, accessible from anywhere through Tailscale without a single port open to the outside world. And best of all, the Immich mobile app automatically switches to my Tailscale IP address when I leave home, so my photos are always with me. I have automatic backups setup so anytime a new photo hits my photo library on my iPhone it backs up to my home server.

My media plays when I want it. My budget is mine. My passwords live on my hardware. My files sync across devices without touching a corporate server.

Monthly cost for all of it: electricity. About $12 a month.

No subscription renewals. No price increase emails. No terms of service updates I have to pretend to read. No corporation deciding what features I get to keep. No one mining my family photos to train their AI model. No one storing my financial data on a server I have never seen.

I am not going to pretend the road here was clean. You just read the story. Nextcloud encryption nightmares. Hardware that was not powerful enough. An Unraid server I could not recover. Years of tinkering, breaking things, and rebuilding from scratch.

But I would do all of it again without hesitation.

Because the alternative is what we started with. Over $130 a month. Over $1,600 a year. Growing every year. For access to things that should already be mine.

That is why I started Your Data, Your Rules.

I am not an expert with a course to sell you. I am someone who figured it out the hard way and thought other people might benefit from watching me do it again, more carefully this time, and writing it all down.

Every issue I will show you one piece of this stack. What it replaces. Why it is worth it. And exactly how to set it up yourself.

Your data. Your hardware. Your rules.

What This Costs You To Start

You do not need expensive hardware. You do not need to be a developer. You need a spare computer, a Raspberry Pi, or a Virtual Machine, an internet connection, and a few hours on Sundays.

One time hardware investment of $0 to $150 if you do not already have something lying around. A few dollars a month in electricity. That is your entire cost structure.

Think about that for a second. One month of the subscriptions you just saw above could buy the hardware to replace most of them permanently. One month. And every month after that you keep the money. Or reinvest into your home server.

The corporations spent years making you believe there was no alternative. There is. It just requires your time and the willingness to try something different.

What Is Coming Next

I am going to walk you through exactly how I set this up from scratch. No experience needed.

• What is self-hosting and why should you care

• Setting up Linux on any hardware

• Docker and Docker Compose, the engine that runs everything

• Your first replacement, ditching streaming services for Plex or Jellyfin

You do not need to be technical. You need to be tired enough to try something different and willing to learn.

Subscribe now

Corporations count on you not noticing the incremental increases. I am here to help you notice.

Let us take back control.

Your Data, Your Rules publishes every two weeks. Free subscribers get every post. Paid subscribers get the detailed step-by-step setup guides and docker configs.

Affiliate Disclosure This post contains affiliate links to products I personally use or would recommend. If you purchase through these links I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend hardware and material I would buy myself.