Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc?

Sure, but then the data is, in most cases, not mine. It’s shared with some 3rd party. “Free” apps aren’t ever free. No such thing as “free”. You’re always paying with something.

Other than that, it’s a hobby. Learning hosting, docker, containers, servers, Linux, etc.

Total control. Let’s take the budgeting app for example. I started using Mint in 2009. There’s more than a decade worth of banking, spending, and investment information in there.

Mint is shuttering in about a month. They gave all their users a month and a half notice. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

When a self hosted app is used (with appropriate backups, orchestration, etc) YOU the user get to decide when you’re done.

If something isn’t working for your life anymore, you can find an alternative and migrate everything over on your own schedule.

When you use a “free” app, you pay with your data.

Thats something a lot of us don’t want to. Additionally, it makes fun and is kind of a hobby to build and maintain this stuff.

“self hosted budget management app”. Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc? 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 don’t want some third party having access to all of my transaction history and knowing what I spend and where.

I hope I don’t sound stupid please enlighten me.

Your question isn’t stupid. There is an important decision you need to make on “is the juice worth the squeeze.” While you can selfhost a lot of stuff sometimes there’s better reasons not to. Email is primary example that gets brought up a lot. Sure you CAN self host it, but for a lot of people on this sub it’s not worth the effort required to do so.

Each person has to make that decision for each of the things they choose to self host. Budget apps are no different.

Most if not all apps on phones will require you to sign up and your date is out of your control as it is not hosted by yourself. Plus you are usually limited to doing everything on your phone which is a pita.

Selfhosting is a way of life. I enjoy providing services to myself and my family that I control with the peace of mind of knowing that data stays with me. And it’s fun doing it too!

My guess is once you start selfhosting yourself, you’ll eventually come to the same conclusions.

However, selfhosting isn’t without it’s dangers. You have to ensure you have backups of the data. You are also responsible for securing it and you have to maintain your infrastructure as well

Because we can. Just because we can.

So I can backup and move my data as I please. Also means if it’s self hosted I can access it from anywhere.

Mint is probably the largest budget app out there and they just announced that they will be going away at the end of this year. Many of us have years of data in Mint that we are about to lose.

Experience has taught me to avoid depending on third party services for something I could self-host.

Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc?

For one instance of app, it’s possible to install it onto a single machine.

Things get tricky when you want to access the data from multiple devices. Even trickier, when several people want to access it. After a certain point, it’s easier to have a “cloud” solution. And since “cloud” is just somebody’s else computer, why not make this a computer YOU own?

I got sick and tired of throwing my money at unreliable, overpriced hosting solutions, only to discover I could do it at a fraction of the cost at home, and without ever opening a single port to the public.

An easy reason to self host apps: share media with the household. Sure you can have a samba share and have people browse trough a folder to find the good movie. Or they can load jellyfin or Plex and have a netflix like interface that remembers where you left off and all the fun stuff. You can then add other stuff that will automatically search, download and organize new TV shows episodes for your, etc…

Another reason is some stuff are only possible when hosting. For instance, grocy is an app that lives on a server and manages your stock of food. You can scan goods with your phone and add them to your stock. You can scan them when you throw the can/box etc to say you used it up.

Then it generates a shopping list for you. The nice thing is that it lives on your server, not on your phone. So if more than 1 people do the shopping, you can have a synchronized shopping list, and update it in real time. And the self in self host part is cool because you decide who sees this and no Google or Amazon makes a profile out of your shopping habits.

You can have an online office suite that works in your browser without anyone unauthorized seeing your files.

You can have a bookstack wiki, where you put notes about the house, or whatever you want, and gave it being reachable only by you and people you allow, without a lot of account management.

You can have your own nextcloud, so you have file sync, calendar, etc, without it going at Google or apple. And it is on your server so you can have as much or as little data backup as you want. And often a good fiber line is cheaper than a VPS or a full dedicated server…

With all of this, you can seamlessly switch between multiple computers . You can also manage the loss/destruction of your laptop. Or phone. You can have a local equivalent to Google photos with photoprism.

You can have a frigate server for video surveillance and object recognition, but all in local, your video files don’t leave your house. A s it will do local AI stuff.

Last but not least: when you self host your stuff, you can still do a lot when the internet is down. You can replicate services on your laptop if you want. You do whatever you want.

Some of it has to do with open source. For example, the budgeting app I use in proprietary and is excellent and I happily pay for it. However if the company went bust or was acquired or something else unfavourable happened, I’d be up a creek without a paddle. At least if it’s open source there’s some hope of it at least not completely disappearing

Security. Having your data in your own control instead of blindly trusting companies, where it’s more likely than not your data is being sold.

Choice. If there isn’t a feature, add it yourself, switch frameworks, change everything if you want, no more “we’re working on it” status updates when something isn’t working or a feature isn’t out. All the options are in your hands.

Pricing. Why pay monthly for “premium features” when you can have the most premium tiers for free. Especially true on anything with storage limits, 1tb of storage drive being cheaper than a few months of 1gb storage on some apps.

Speed. Sometimes it’s just more streamlined when there’s less bloat and you’ve hosted the exact thing you need on your subdomain with a single login page between you and the exact page you need. Less interaction needed to get where you’re trying to go.

After a while, you start to get tired of apps and other online services either disappearing or changing in ways you don’t like.

Most of the time it’s just a hobby and I enjoy the challenge of solving a “problem” we have at home.

But for payment related stuff, I prefer having control over my own data. Granted I upload encrypted backups to a Google Drive via duplicati for important data - so technically Google still holds my data. But they aren’t the ones in control and I have local backups too.

Of course, I don’t back up terabytes of media. I’m considering backing up my own rips, harder to find stuff as well as my music (some, I don’t even remember where I got it, because it’s been on external drives for well over a decade).