Self-Hosted

Every self-hosting guide starts the same way: “Forget Dropbox, forget Google Drive — run it yourself and save money.” I’m going to tell you something different. Self-hosting costs money. Self-hosting costs time. Self-hosting has hidden costs that nobody writes about until you’re three hours deep in a broken Docker volume at 11 PM on a Wednesday. This isn’t an anti-self-hosting post. I’ve been running my own servers at home for five years. I love it. But I wish someone had shown me this math before I started. So let me show you the math. ...

You don’t need to pay $10/month for Google Drive. Or $3/month for 1Password. Or $8/month for Notion. You can run all of this at home, on a single Raspberry Pi if you’re careful. But here’s the honest part: some of it is worth the effort. Some of it isn’t. I’ve run a self-hosted cloud at home for three years. This is what I’ve learned. ...

Most homelab beginners make the same mistake: they grab a Docker Compose template, paste it in, and then discover three months later that their “simple setup” is a sprawling mess of undocumented dependencies, a database with no backup, and ports wide open to the internet. I’ve been there. I still end up there sometimes. So I built a tool to catch it before it happens. ...

I wanted a personal AI assistant. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. Something that actually does things — controls my desktop, reads my screen, talks to my smart home, answers questions in Finnish or English, and never, ever sends my data to a server I don’t control. The cloud options are good. They’re not mine. So I started building one. This post is the architecture document for that project. It’s a work in progress — the docker-compose is ready, the Ollama instance is running, and the first agent is next. I’m writing this because the design decisions are interesting, and because someone else might want to build the same thing. ...