What's the purpose here, will you host it and access it from a browser? Or do you only want to backup its data to your server?

I have been online for a long time and seen countless services come and go, often my data goes with them.

So that was my reason for a long time, having my data available and not relying on some third party.

Now, with the emergence of Big Data + AI I've also become a lot more privacy aware. Before I couldn't even imagine why anyone would want to target my data (data mining takes a lot of work to be useful), but now/soon they can just point AI at data dumps and ask it something like "give me a list of X people to exploit, order it by method, chance of success etc etc"

Paranoia? Yes, but suddenly it feels reasonable to be paranoid.

This is going to highly depend on what you hope to achieve with an application.

1. Does the app need more than one person to access it?

2. Does the app need constant up time?

3. Does it make sense to host it?

Really this boils down to how you feel about each of these questions. So your example, the budget software. Yes I can have a single instance of that app on my computer. However I need my wife to have access to it, as she handles the finances.

Another example however is Jellyfin. This is something that is accessed from multiple locations and by multiple people. So today I might be watching a movie while I work. Tomorrow my wife might be doing that. Friday we might have family night. So that needs a server hosted out to actually make sense.

Game servers are another example here. They need constant up time and to be on hardware that is not the machine I am playing the game on.

It is also important to remember that many of us host all of this in a single location that we back up, and also have redundant drives. So we can easily make sure we have copies of our data at any given point. So while yea I can keep all my D&D data and PDF management on my computer, it is easier and more secure to keep and host that on my server where I have a backup and parity running. There plenty of other examples here too like my phone pictures of my daughter or other various bits of data.

Finally, there are things I just want to tinker and play with. I have no reason to host specific things other than to look at what the tech is like. Stable Diffusion is an example here. But my own ChatGPT instance would be useful if only every now and then. Just have to figure out what exactly makes the most sense to you.

let's take the budgeting app as an example. Here is what I want.

1. Free
2. open source
3. Available anywhere on any device
4. All data stored on MY equipment. No cloud provider or 3rd party

The only way to achieve this is self hosting in my opinion.

Privacy.

Those free (or even paid) apps on your phone are selling all of the data you give them to other companies.

For me, it started when I first replaced my 500GB HDD with a 128GB SSD in my laptop. As it was much smaller, i had the need for a NAS. I did not have the money for it, but I had an old PC and some used HDDs.

Now I run 3 node docker swarm cluster with a dedicated machine for storage, for video sharing, password management, document managemeny, photo management, server mangement, personal accounting, streaming service replacement, device backup, dns server. And these are just the services I use daily.

Control

For me it's mainly the fun. I'm less privacy minded than other people here but I'm sure that I will be happy to own all my data at some point in time.

Freedom?

For example I saw a post asking for recommendation for a "self hosted budget management app"

that's not something I would host on my home server, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an audience.

not everything might be for you!

Basically yes, you can install the app. Where is the data for that app stored? If on the phone, then your data is lost when your phone dies (maybe even when you switch phones). If in the cloud, that's great, but then someone else has your data. Selfhosting is to get the convenience of "the cloud" (multi-device/user sync and sharing) without actually relying on the cloud.

Take Jellyfin/Plex/Emby for example. Yes, you can just connect a laptop with and HDMI cable and play from VLC. Or you can just use an USB stick in the TV and play from the file system. But you have 2 TVs, a tablet, and a phone that all want to watch something from your movie collection. Of course you can just plug this stick into other devices, and use it that way. Or subscribe to Netflix that may or may not have the movie you want to watch. But what if you had your own Netflix that can be used by multiple phones, tvs and tablets, even at the same time? What if it even synced the progress of a series so your TV no.2 knows where you left off on phone no. 4? This is what self hosting is made for. You HOST "Netflix" yourSELF.

What’s your hobby? Football? Yeah I don’t get why you watch that when you could spend an afternoon self-hosting instead…

Lets say you buy groceries but don't have a fridge, your next door neighbor offers to share their fridge as its massive, makes sense. However if you own a fridge, why would you use your neighbors fridge?

When it comes to budget apps... I haven't found the one that has everything built in. I'd rather build it myself and host it as well.

Selfhosting can be a desktop app as well, meaning you don't want to use a SaaS product.

Let’s say you’re VM home lab server has reliable backups & snapshots setup.

You treat your PC, phone, tablet as expendable devices. Nothing saved locally, nothing backed up. If your one of your client devices does, they are easily replaced. Because all important data is on your server. Single point of capture, so everything is backed up and safe.

If you’re in that scenario. You’d want to run everything off your home server.

One thing I haven't seen talked about as much is just the variety of self-hosted applications that might even have paid/enterprise counterparts because the use-case is so extremely niche. Either that or it's only targeted towards big businesses.

Everything from monitoring a homebrewing operation to keeping a full inventory of my possessions can be accomplished with selfhosted apps that may otherwise be subscription based or nonexistent in the paid market.

You can access it from any device (assuming relevant client apps and its over the network)

Also, cost. If I want 18 TB of data accessible from my phone or someone else’s house, how would you do that and not cost a ton of money? I can repurpose old thin clients and I needed the space anyway, so yeah.

because this is the next best thing to Wizardry. I can make something from nothing. Well except for the hardware, thats something, something we all love to tinker with

This is like asking why do you cook your own food at home.

I self host because I know what I am getting, I can control the price I want to pay, and I don't really need to involve other people in my life.

I killed more PCs by stupidly placing my screwdriver (2) than by static discharge (0). And I opened, build and handled like 100 PCs in my 5 years of IT

I mainly host password, private sensible data, and photos on my own home server. That's it.

Selfhosting is a journey of motivation, frustration and learning.
Perks are: Appliable knowledge in the IT space and understanding of virtual concepts be it Software Stacks or Networking interactions, "offline" Data i.E. selfhosted and not under someone elses thumb/control/exposure

Since you have access to all data, you can basically do magic behind closed doors and reap the benefits.

Setting up a selfhosted Environment means you can pipe in offline ressources just aswell as share access to specific entities without handing the keys over to a 3rd party.

In the case of a budget management app - it's finances. Not everybody is cool with having their finances hosted in an app on a device that can crash or get stolen, we'd rather have access to it when we need and want, but still have that data when all my devices used to access it usually are gone.

i.e. when the Service Provider decides to shut down - this one aint. (shot at google)

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I've started with one ThinClient, then bought two more to cluster them up and experiment with HighAvailability and shared CEPH-Storage between the nodes for 10s Migrations of fullblown VMs.. then bought a Dell Workstation with Two Server CPUs and .. basically virtualized that ProxMox cluster within my ProxMox Baremetal Dell host.

With the knowledge i managed to gather in the last year alone, I'm able to setup a coherent Work Environment for 50+ People with reliable SSO and 2FA mechanisms, shared FAST storage with dedublication of files and continous nightly backups that get checked for validity and automatic pruning of old unneeded backups on - 1 external NAS + Cold Storage on a buddys Datacenter with 20TB of encrypted storage just for me.

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I basically have no care in the world for the data in my house at this point, since everything's backed up nightly.

I can restore from House fire by setting up a new host with ProxMox, mounting the network storage and restoring the NAS and BackupVM - then just clicking restore on everything..
Since the Services are all on a subnet that's managed virtually by a OPNSense VM and VPN is run on the ProxMox host, everything is drag and drop + Setup your own VPN Solution - if I ever want to gift someone my done work without the data, basically.

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Why do i NEED this?
To break the spiral of neccessairy skills and knowledge for 'entry level' jobs in technical positions and understanding behind security implications, proper troubleshooting, documentation and service culture i.e. there's so many technologies i'm somehwat familiar with now, that I understand what others in the buisness world need of me to properly process errors, requests, whatever.

For me, it is a balance between what I am trying to accomplish and the time/energy/maintenance I am willing to put into accomplishing that thing.

I used to self-host a personal website on Wordpress, but now I farm that out to a static site hosting provider because I would rather spend the time building the website instead of spending the same time maintaining the hosting.

I self-host a kubernetes homelab environment because that is a personal investment in skill that i don't want to pay exorbitant cloud prices for.

For me selfhosting is all about privacy and rights on your data. If you can host it, you are responsible for the data and the only one (theoretically) able to read it.

Data is my answer most of the time. Here are some books recommendations.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Afterlives of Data

Black Box Society

Revolutionary Mathematics

Privacy

Because the government will use my data to train the AI overlords.

Also because i can and enjoy running my own services and infra. Helps me land a better job and expand my skills

Wait, you mean not every one runs a hypervisor at their house with 15 - 20 guest using more technology than most small businesses? 😂

Short answer, it’s just fun!

My primary purpose was to host my own music server. Have tonnes od CDs and what not and ripped them all onto a media server. This then evolved to Navidrome, then Airsonic. It's like having your own, private Spotify. More music you add, woot.

Then, I wanted my DVD/Blueray collection on a server. A simple HTTP server hosts these, and Kodi both accesses them, and offers them up via uPnP for local hosts.

Then there are backups. A small NAS for these. Samba, SFTP, FTPS and even HTTP(s) upload capabilities.

Then using the web server to host some HTML generated from say Cron, to show stats of stuff.

The a logcat server. So everything can log to a central place.

An internal mail server, so local hosts can email their logs to the central logger. Weird some can email, but not syslog.

Then some influxdb to offload metrics from routers and hosts. Then a pretty dashboard from Chronograph and what not.

Everything else after, is just gravy.

You don't sound stupid at all!

Before switching to Actual budget, I used YNAB. Just an app to install that works on my phone and on my PC.

It's all synced to the cloud so the same data appears on both devices.

But, I'm tied to YNAB's choices. They decided to increase prices, so I had to find something else.

Instead, Actual is completely controlled by me. None of my data with anyone else, no price, no subscription, no concern that changes will be forced on me that I don't like. It's all in my control.

That's why I would rather self-host a budgeting software than just install one.

This is like asking why no speaks one language saying, " I don't understand how/why people speak different languages."

Tons of reasons, some geographical, some political to some biblical, and other just out of spite.

To answer your statement... Tons of reasons; some listed already but too many to state. I suggest you research more and it'll help you understand why.

Mainly for control and privacy of our data so it doesn’t get stolen or others don’t bank off of selling our data

Short answer: accessibility, security, and privacy.

Long answer: Hosted services allow accessibility for more devices and users. If your network is properly secured and maintained, your personal network will be more secure than huge services that are well known targets with thousands of employees as potential victims of social engineering. Privacy because I don’t trust my data with third parties and cloud based services.

Some added detail on that last topic, it’s not just trust to secure my data; it’s trust to respect my data. I’ve worked as a software engineer building systems for marketing teams. I’ve worked projects to integrate with data warehousing services and social media platforms. Most people would be shocked by how much data companies have collected and correlated with you.