The thesis is simple: your data is more private when it lives on hardware you control. No one is training a model on it, scanning it for ads, or changing the terms of service while you sleep. Almost every service below has a polished commercial equivalent — often a good one. I run the open-source version because it keeps my data local, my costs flat, and my understanding deep.

There are real trade-offs. You become the support team. Backups are your problem. Upgrades are your call. If that sounds like work rather than fun, the cloud app is the right answer — no shame in that. But if you value the ownership and enjoy understanding how things fit together, running your own stack is worth it.

Virtualization & Platform

Turn a few physical machines into a flexible, highly-available pool of virtual ones.

Proxmox VE
vs. VMware vSphere / ESXi, Nutanix
Proxmox Backup Server
vs. Veeam Backup & Replication

Networking & Access

Segment, route, secure, and selectively expose the lab.

OPNsense
vs. Fortinet / Cisco firewalls
Nginx Proxy Manager
vs. Cloud load balancers / managed reverse proxy
Cloudflare Tunnel
vs. ngrok, Tailscale Funnel
Tailscale
vs. Corporate VPN, Zscaler / Twingate (ZTNA)
ntopng
vs. Commercial NPM / Darktrace
Network speed testing (iperf3 / LibreSpeed / Speedtest Tracker)
vs. Ookla Speedtest, commercial WAN monitors

Identity & Secrets

One secure login everywhere, with credentials stored properly.

Authentik
vs. Okta, Microsoft Entra ID
HashiCorp Vault
vs. AWS Secrets Manager, CyberArk / Delinea

CMDB & Inventory

A single source of truth for what exists and where.

NetBox
vs. ServiceNow CMDB, Device42

Containers & Dashboards

Run and see all the small services at a glance.

Portainer
vs. Docker Desktop, Rancher
Homepage
vs. (mostly a self-hosted-only niche)
Static file server
vs. Netlify / GitHub Pages / S3 static hosting

Source Control & Docs

Own the code and the diagrams.

Gitea
vs. GitHub, GitLab
draw.io (diagrams)
vs. Lucidchart, Microsoft Visio

Observability & Security

If you can't see it or restore it, you don't really run it.

Monitoring stack (Prometheus / Loki / Grafana / blackbox)
vs. Datadog, New Relic
Uptime Kuma
vs. Pingdom, UptimeRobot
Wazuh
vs. Splunk, CrowdStrike Falcon
Gotify
vs. Pushover, PagerDuty

Remote Access

Reach a desktop or console from anywhere, through one gateway.

Apache Guacamole
vs. Citrix, TeamViewer

Smart Home

Local-first home automation that doesn't phone home.

Home Assistant
vs. Samsung SmartThings, Google/Alexa ecosystems

Local AI

Run models on my own hardware — private prompts, predictable cost.

LiteLLM gateway
vs. OpenAI API direct, OpenRouter

Homegrown automations (blogs deferred this run)

Small glue projects — listed for completeness, spotlight posts to come.

Morning briefing write-up soon
Sports alerts write-up soon
Telegram bot write-up soon
eBay deal hunter write-up soon
Security audit workflow write-up soon
Claude usage tracker write-up soon
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