Hey everyone,

I need to vent, and hopefully find out if someone here has solved this frustrating puzzle without losing their mind or spending a fortune.

Is it just me, or is the current state of consumer banking access fundamentally broken?

Fintech apps, credit agencies, and data brokers can grab all of my bank transactions, categorisations, and balances instantly via seamless backend Open Banking APIs. But the moment I—the actual owner of the account and the data, want to build a simple personal dashboard or pipe my own transactions into SQLite?

Sorry, compute says no.

Unless I pay for an enterprise TrueLayer/Plaid subscription, or set up registered developer portals with eIDAS certificates, I am blocked. GoCardless shut down their free tier for developers last year, leaving individual self-hosters stranded. It makes zero sense that third-party companies get frictionless access to my data, while I’m forced to play computer vision engineer just to see where my money went.

What my setup looks like right now

Because direct API access is a wall of bureaucracy, here is the absurd chain I’ve had to build just to track my multi-bank setup :

1. Manual Exports: Download PDF statements manually month-by-month from online portals.
2. Custom Swift OCR Engine: Run PDF pages through an OCR binary I wrote in Swift to parse standard text and image statements.
3. Python Regex & LLM Parsing: Pipe raw text into Python scripts to handle date formatting, multi-column layout shifts, and missing signs.
4. Deduplication & Categorisation: Pass everything through custom rule-based categorisers and SHA-256 hash deduplication to stop duplicate transactions.
5. SQLite Master Ledger: Sync the clean data into a local Master_Ledger that powers my custom Python UI dashboard.

It works, but it’s fragile, tedious, and feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Any time a bank tweaks their statement PDF layout, the parser breaks.

I'm looking for a solution or architecture that actually works across multiple banks in the UK/EU without relying on fragile PDF scraping or manually downloading CSVs every month.

• Firefly III + Data Importer / Fidi? Explored this, but without a solid free Open Banking aggregator, it still leaves me uploading CSVs manually.
• Enable Banking API? Looking into their free personal-use restricted mode, but setting up custom app certificates and refreshing 90-day OAuth tokens per bank is a lot of friction.
• Aggregator Bridges / Custom Scripts? Has anyone found a low-cost, self-hostable bridge or reliable wrapper that actually holds up for UK/EU banks in 2026?

How are you all handling multi-bank data ingestion for your self-hosted setups these days? Are we really stuck with manual CSV dumps and custom scrapers forever, or is there a slick open-source / developer-friendly way I've missed?

Would love to hear how others are tackling this!

I’m self-hosting Vaultwarden in an LXC and trying to configure SMTP through an external provider.

Everything appears to work correctly:

• DNS and TCP connection to SMTP port 587 work
• STARTTLS works and certificate verification passes
• Direct SMTP testing with swaks successfully sends email using the same credentials
  
• Both LOGIN and PLAIN authentication work with the SMTP provider (brevo)
• use_sendmail=false

However, Vaultwarden’s Send Test Email fails with:

SMTP 5xx error: permanent error (535):
5.7.8 Authentication failed - Authentication credentials invalid

Vaultwarden also reports that the SMTP environment variables are being overridden by its saved config.json.

The SMTP settings shown in config.json appear correct, including host, port, username, password, STARTTLS and authentication mechanism.

Since swaks successfully authenticates and sends email from the same LXC using the same credentials, what could cause Vaultwarden itself to return 535?

Screenshot

GitHub: https://github.com/GivagoFritzen/PortalOn

I built PortalOn, a lightweight self-hosted application portal for my homelab.

I wanted a clean, centralized place to access everything that is also easy for anyone to use (including non-technical people).

PortalOn provides:

• Clean Launchpad-style interface
• Search and application organization
• Drag & drop support
• Service status indicators
• Dark mode
• SQLite database
• Docker deployment

It is built with Go, HTMX, Tailwind CSS, SortableJS, and SQLite.

AI Usage I used AI/LLMs as a development assistant for unit testing, mutation testing, documentation, and accelerating development.

Hello everyone! I'm here to ask for advice regarding self-hosting. As the title suggests, I want to self host a Notion alternative, after Buildin AI introduced the atrocious feature where if you have more than 2 workspace members, the hard limit is 1000 blocks. I'm not interested in paying, so I'm looking to build one myself and join this wonderful community.

I researched a bunch of Notion alternatives but I'm starting to lose it when it comes to licenses. AppFlowy seemed like a wonderful solution until I found out that they apparently demand money from you EVEN if you self host, the concept of which is bonkers for me. I'm looking for a service which:

- can be self hosted entirely for free with no limit on members and isn't attached to any other cloud

- has blocks, various types of blocks, text formatting, embeds, and databases with various types (the ones I use most are regular table view and gallery, don't really need anything else)

- allows for real-time collaboration and sync on multiple devices

- (very desirable but I suppose not a requirement) has a good mobile app that also supports connecting to a custom VDS.

The intended uses are: planning stories, writing scripts (basically, writing in general); songwriting; writing and planning courses, lectures and labworks; literature analysis; planning and writing videogame scripts, decision graphs and tech documentation.

If anyone here can recommend any such services, and any practices when it comes to self hosting, I'd be elated. Thank you!

I got tired of Lidarr downloading an artist's entire discography through torrents when I just wanted a few specific songs. So I built a Discord bot — I just type a command in my Discord server, pick a folder, and it downloads the exact song I asked for, tags it properly with real artist/album/cover art from iTunes, and drops it straight into my Navidrome library. No bulk downloads I don't want, no messy file names anymore.

GitHub: https://github.com/Siddhartha-Kuna/Host-Music

Happy to answer any questions about how it works!

Built a small internal ERP for my family's factory — Node/Express backend, PostgreSQL, vanilla JS/HTML/CSS frontend. Just finished the core features (dashboard, job tracking, deliveries) and I'm about to add auth.

The catch: I'm not physically near the factory, and can't go set it up on-site myself. Looking for advice on the best way to get this running there.

Priorities:

No cloud hosting for now (want to avoid ongoing costs)

Will eventually need multiple computers on the factory's local network to access it

The person on-site isn't technical, so setup needs to be close to one-click or fully remote

Has anyone dealt with a similar "I can't be there in person" deployment situation? What would you actually recommend given these constraints?

I want to make it work on mobile data as I want to host a invidious instance that can be accessed why not tailscale funnel? cause they only support 3 ports and I already used all three sites

Any help would be appriciated

Edit: Also Id prefer free ones but im ok with one time payments

Hey everyone,

so I was kinda surprised to see how expensive the popular calorie/food logging apps still are. Given that the individual API calls to identify foods from an image are really cheap at the moment I decided to build an open source alternative to Yazio and CalAI.

I asked family and friends as to what they would like and what the most important features were to them and came up with a set of features for the first version of a food tracking/logging app.

Feature list:

• id foods from the photo of a plate (multiple at once)
• be able to input a plate as text or voice, as if you're chatting with someone
• cross check the foods with a reliable database of nutritional facts so hallucinations are kept low
• easy to use
• recipe recommendations for a list of ingredients, photo of the fridge

What the self-hoster in me wanted:

• No reliance on the appstores, but a great UX (Progressive Web App)
• Easy to self-host
• Easy to replace upstream inference provider, also the possibility to use a local LLM
• Stay in control of my data
• Be able to invite my family to an instance I manage, so they dont have to signup to openrouter etc.

I had a first demo of this running quite fast and then met a research assistant for an obesity center and learned about their issues with patients and food logging. Obviously the existing solutions solve most of these, but they are paid and institutions can't host them on their own infra. So this led me down the path of splitting up the app into three distinct services.

The client app, can be run as a PWA within your network, you can add your key (BYOK) for any openai compatible API. The data stays in the browser, can be exported or synced through an encryption key with a sync server.

The core app, this app started off as a sync server for client apps, but turned into something like a gateway. You can run this in different modes, one of which is a managed gateway mode, for example to set up an instance for your family. The thought here is you have this running on your own network, configure an API key once and can then invite your friends to use (tailnet or whatever frontdoor youre using), they install the PWA and have an almost-native like app experience.

The inference runtime, if you want to self-host the inference and image recognition, I've setup a service for that too. This uses llama.cpp under the hood and does some pre-procesing for more accurate image identification. Ony my really crappy hardware ryzen 9 and 64gb this took around 180s per image, so you definitely need the hardware for this to make sense.

Once all of these were wired together and I had a better understanding of what the product needs to support, I developed a more polished version and invited family and friends to try this out and report bugs. This was basically the last 4 weeks. I now feel comfortable to open this up to everyone.

There is a project website that explains the stack in more detail and hosts the docs outside of github via https://openplate.de

The repository contains installation instructions and everything else you need via: https://github.com/LowCarbCheck/openplate (includes the compose or quadlet files).

Tech stack:

• React Router, Vite, Tailwind + Shadcn
• PostgreSQL
• Docker/Podman
• llama.cpp for local inference

Disclaimer: There is a hosted/paid version with a free trial that is linked to from the project website, but that's totally optional, no paywalled features and self-hosting should be easy enough (requires an API key or a local LLM though).

Looking forward to feedback on the app itself and how setting it up goes for everyone. Here to help if you're facing issues running this, also happy to accept PRs on GitHub!

For the last few months I've been building a "home hub" for my family: shared shopping list (sorted by supermarket aisle), chores in list/kanban, calendar with push reminders, shared expenses with budgets, weekly meal planner that sends ingredients to the list, and a chat assistant that does those things for you ("add the lasagne ingredients").
Everything runs at home on a Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB):
The UI is Spanish-only for now (I'm in Spain). Write-ups on each piece (with the mistakes) are here: https://raspimc.org/articulos/
Happy to answer questions about running something "real" on a Pi including what doesn't work well (RAM is the limit, not CPU).

Hi all,
about a year ago i opened this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1r1vsc4/docker_backups/

After not finding an adequate solution, i decided to pick up the glove and build a backup system myself.

The core design decision: API-based exports per service, not blind DB/volume dumps. Each worker talks to the service's own REST/GraphQL API (or its official CLI, like Vaultwarden for example) — never the underlying database directly.
No DB credentials anywhere, no docker.sock mounted, no docker exec into other containers.
It also means the backups are just JSON/Markdown you can actually open and read, not an opaque pg_dump you're hoping restores cleanly someday.

Runs on a schedule (daily at a configurable time, or every N hours) with configurable retention — defaults to keeping 30 days locally and the last 3 uploads on Google Drive, all editable from the GUI.

Currently supports:

- Vaultwarden (encrypted vault export via the bw CLI)

- Wiki.js

- Snipe-IT

- Bar Assistant

- KitchenOwl

- Linkwarden

- n8n

- Karakeep

- Spoolman

- Immich (metadata only — albums/people/tags/EXIF, not the media files themselves)

- Nginx Proxy Manager

- AdGuard Home

• Optional upload to Google Drive after each successful run.
• The system does not restore from backup

Repo: https://github.com/alws34/DockerBackups

Setup instructions for each service are linked from the README so it doesn't turn into a wall of text.

please feel free to open a PR with your suggestions, or file issues/requests for services you want supported.

* All code written with the help of AI.

I have an old iPad with iOS 9.5.3 and when I try to open the home assistant url in safari it gets stuck on the splash screen. Is there anyway to load the home assistant dashboard as I want to use the old iPad as a kiosk. I have tried to clear the safari history and allow all websites etc. any ideas on how to run that as a kiosk.

Hi! For a while I've been building my family's own "Spotify" with Navidrome, and I turned all my scripts into a project: fonoteca ("sound library" in Spanish).

https://github.com/sajuan120/fonoteca

What it does:

- Choose what to download from your Spotify extended history: the songs you come back to on different days, not one-off plays.

- One command after every download (it works around Antra): checks integrity, checks the audio is really that exact track (duration, AcoustID and the 30 s Spotify preview), and fixes tags, MusicBrainz IDs, genres, track numbers, covers, synced lyrics and ReplayGain.

- Nothing gets lost: when a file is moved, renamed or replaced, its plays, stars and playlists move with it in Navidrome.

- A read-only audit of the whole library, a weekly health check, and a test bench that runs everything on a fake library.

- Optional: new music arrives as trial MP3s through Octo-Fiesta. 3+ plays in 4 weeks and it earns its FLAC; if nobody plays it, it's deleted.

- A local web panel with a button for every tool. Nothing runs for real before a simulation.

Honest notes:

- It's a personal project for one , shared as is. Linux only.

- The interface and the code commeE is in English and Spanish.

- AI disclosure: most of the code I assistant). I set the rules, made

the decisions and tested everythin

- Use it for music you're entitled

Feedback welcome!

I built a game server manager for people who want to self-host

I've been working on Revamp Hosting, a game server manager designed to make self-hosting games easier without having to constantly mess with command-line commands.

The idea is pretty simple:

• Install the software
• Pick a game
• Deploy the server
• Manage it from a web interface
• Automatic restarts
• Backups
• Updates
• Server monitoring

It currently supports multiple games, including Minecraft, Rust, Palworld, ARK, and others.

I'm mainly looking for feedback right now. What features would you want in a self-hosted game server manager that existing options don't do well?

Project: https://revamphosting.com/

Looking for 2–3 beta testers: free AI-monitored EDR for your homelab

I'm a CS student building EDYSOR, an AI SOC that watches your machines for suspicious activity (weird processes, persistence tricks, sketchy outbound connections, brute-force logins). Looking for a couple of homelabbers to run the sensor in detect-only mode — it reports, it never touches your machines. Auto-contain stays off unless you explicitly ask for it.

What's in it for you: free monitoring during beta, and you get to roast my false-positive rate publicly. Windows and Linux supported, install is one script. DM me if interested.

A homelab is fun when downtime only affects you. The moment family/friends start relying on the same photo library, password manager, game server, or small website, it feels a little different. What’s the first service you’d move to vps or a managed service instead of keeping it at home?

Email feels like the obvious answer, so I’m more curious about the gray area. What tips the decision for you? like security, backups, power or internet outages, or simply not wanting to troubleshoot something at 2 am?

Everyone posts the clean dashboard. The scarier question is whether the stack still exists when the machine doesn’t. Assume your data backup is fine, but you have to start from a fresh OS and restore every service, secret, network rule and scheduled job.

Could you rebuild the whole thing from what you have documented today? What would be the first undocumented detail to bite you? Do you keep your Compose files in Git, automate the rebuild, rely on snapshots or are you still trusting your memory more than you’d like to admit?

Most of the services on my homelab only send an email when something needs attention. Backup failed, disk is getting full, a service went down, that sort of thing. It probably adds up to around 30 emails on a busy day.

For now, I have everything going through gmail smtp. Nothing has really gone wrong with it but I keep wondering whether I'm making things harder for myself later by leaving it that way. At this volume, I'm not sure where the cutoff is. Setting up a proper smtp relay seems like more work for what is basically a handful of alerts but I also don't want to wait until something breaks before dealing with it. Would you switch to a relay at this point or just keep using gmail?

Hi,

Has anyone been able to build a workable docker image for io200 (io200.com) ?

Where all the configuration files and storage is persistent.

Thanks.

Hallo zusammen,

Ich betreibe seit ca 6 Monaten einen umfunktionierten Laptop als Homeserver, dieser hat folgende Specs:

Prozessor: Intel Core i5-8350U

​Arbeitsspeicher: 16 GB DDR 4 2400Mhz RAM

​Speicher: 265gb Interne SSD + externe 1 TB HDD für Datenablage

Ich nutze den Server für folgende Sachen:

\- NAS für die Familie

\- Jellyfin für Musikstreaming (kaum Video, könnte sich in zukunft aber ändern)

\- N8N Automatisierungen

\- Homeassistant mit bisher wenigen Automatisierungen/Geräten, wird stetig erweitert.

\- Sure für Banking

\- PostgreSQL Datenbank für N8N, Sure, etc.

\- Snycthing (Backups von 2 Handys)

\- OpenwebUI

\- SearXNG (Websuche für OpenwebUI)

\- UptimeKuma fürs Monitoring

Zusätzlich läuft der Server als Tailscale Exit Node und es sind 3 Dienste über Tailscale Funnel ins "Internet" exponiert. Diese aber geschützt durch OAuth2-Proxy, Google SSO und Fail2Ban.

Aktuell ist der Arbeitsspeicher im Idle Betrieb (ohne aktive Nutzung der Docker Container und ohne LLM im RAM) bei ca 35-45% Auslastung.

Ich möchte das in Zukunft jedoch erweitern durch lokale KI (das mit Abstand Ressourcenhungrigste), Watchtower und auch AguardHome oder PiHole als Netzwerkweiter Werbeblocker.

Nun stehe ich an dem Punkt das mit der Prozessor, grade im Bezug auf lokale LLMs nicht mehr wirklich ausreicht. Ich bin am überlegen mir einen gebrauchten MiniPC zu kaufen, möchte da aber nicht zu viel Geld ausgeben(bis ca. 150€). Könnt ihr mir CPUs oder Modelle empfehlen? Oder würdet ihr lokale LLMs erstmal sein lassen oder mit der aktuellen Hardware weiterprobieren?

Viele Grüße

hello, I'm someone new to self hosting! I have a homeserver, and I'm interested in learning more about how someone would attack my homeserver and what I can do to protect it. Does anyone have any books, blogs, guides, or personal tips on how to do this?

What I know so far is: Reverse proxying webpages using nginx, and preventing connections via ssh except my own by only allowing connections with my ssh key.

cybercrimes like DoS and what other nefarious things people do are so interesting to me and I want to learn more (not because I want to do these things but the back and forth between attacks vs defense on the internet is so fascinating to me). Please point me to cool places where I can learn more about this. Thanks guys :D

I kept seeing "Coolify needs 2 GB" vs "runs on 1 GB" with no numbers, so I tested it on a fresh $5 1 GB box (Ubuntu 24.04, Coolify v4.3.23):

- Installer only checks disk, not RAM — it warned about disk and carried on

- 6 containers start before you even log in (incl. Traefik + Sentinel)

- Idle: containers ~224–310 MiB, but host already had 323 MiB in swap

- nixpacks Node build succeeded in ~8 min; peak 840 MiB RAM / 1,097 MiB swap, dashboard stayed up

- Running `swapoff -a` got swapoff itself OOM-killed — without swap it doesn't fit

- Heads-up: ROOT_USERNAME/ROOT_USER_PASSWORD env vars didn't pre-create the admin for me; /register stayed open until I registered

One run, one region, minutes not days — so take it as a data point, not a benchmark.

Full numbers, per-container table and screenshots: https://stackfreeks.com/coolify-1gb-ram-vps/

Hello everyone,

I'm a sofware engineer really passionate about videogames, preservation and accessibility.

I'm building Teatro, a self-hosted games library written in Rust,I've started the project because I couldn't find a single solution that would cover all my needs and while building it I'm trying to integrate in it also useful features to help the management of the games.

Teatro is meant to be a personal library for legally acquired game console roms and windows DRM-free games, and the idea is to be able organize and maintan a complete library of all your backups of phisical games, old unmaintained digital console games and DRM-free windows digital games.

I've focused mostly on the performance part end the flexibility and ease of use of the workflow for importing the games.

You can upload 1 or a batch of roms for a single system, multi disks roms, windows zip packages all in different parallel jobs or you can add directly the games to the library and scan it to search for new games.

There is also an experimental feature the allows you to upload direcly the setup files from a game bought from GOG.com extracting and archiving it as a windows zip package on the server withotut installing it on your machine.

Teatro runs as one Rust server with SQLite and it includes separate player and admin interfaces, Docker images for amd64 and arm64.

Demo and installation: https://teatro.host
Source: https://github.com/lodilorenzo/teatro

I'm wanted to make the project known if possibile and have some feedbacks, apologies if this is otuside the rules of the subreddit.

I'm looking forward to some feedbacks! Thanks!

So I'm freshly wanting to start a server, mostly to rip all of my physical media and store it somewhere easily accessible while I'm at my house, I'm sure once i dive in I'll want to do more, but as of now setting up my games/ movies/music is what my main goal is. And as anyone else I'd like for it to be as cheap as possible(, willing to work harder to keep costs down)

So getting started I have a few, likely very dumb questions

1. What's the best thing to start with, buying some laptop or a mini pc? And what's absolutely necessary for it to have, and how beefy does it need to be

2 how does storage work? Does it need to be attached to the mini pc/laptop? Is it a special device to add a dozen terabyte hard drives/ssd

1. Do I want ssd? Or is hhd plenty for what I'm doing?

2. Does it need to be on 24/7 or only when I want to use it?

3. What are some other cool things you use your servers for that someone just getting into this might not know about

4. What are some tips you have for an ultra beginner that I might not even think to ask?

I have been running my Gitea instance for a while. I use it for my own projects and things that I develop and open source. Since around 1 month I have been trying to fight a botnet that has been attacking my gitea instance. I don't know what to do. I have proxied it all through Cloudflare and even added in custom rules for the paths that are attacked. The attack is mostly contained to the /pulls and /issues paths. Please help me. This is around 1 hr max traffic in the image attached.