It really has improved my daily life. I may be a bit of an outlier since I’m also a developer and selfhost apps I’ve made.
I love music and have been recording (scrobbling) what I listen to for over a decade. I created this app to make the scrobbling process set-and-forget across all the platforms and locations I listen to music.
This little app I wrote consolidates “newely added to plex” discord notifications and posts them all at the same time. Makes my discord server much less noisy.
A homegrown reddit moderation bot platform I developed. I selfhost u/ContextModBot and a slew of other moderator bots. This is probably the biggest advantage I get for self hosting. The bot uses a lot of bandwidth and can be CPU-intensive when doing image hashing and pixel comparisons. If I was hosting this on AWS I’d probably be paying hundreds of $$$ a month.
Between Context Mod and a few other image and text web services used between my friends I do a modest amount of website traffic. Not the end of the world if I hosted in the cloud but still saving me some money for sure.
Home Assistant and Frigate
More common around here. HA has been a QoL upgrade from managing a bunch of different rando “smart home” apps. I also moved away from a Ring doorbell to an Amcrest AD410 with Frigate + Coral for human detection that records events straight to my NAS. No more paying subscription for storage and worrying about amazon peeping on my video.
You might be interested in https://github.com/ItalyPaleAle/hereditas
It’s a deadman switch that houses your docs/data, encrypted, on a self hosted static website.