Self-hosting for a small business: which apps are worth it
A practical shortlist of the open-source apps that save a small business real money and control — and the ones that are not worth the hassle.
Self-hosting is not all-or-nothing. For a small business, the goal is to move the handful of services where you get a real return — in cost, control, or both — without spending your evenings jumping between servers. Here is the shortlist that pays off, and what to leave alone.
Worth self-hosting (high return)
Files & office — Nextcloud. Replaces Drive/Dropbox and, with Collabora/ONLYOFFICE, much of Google Docs. The more seats you have, the more it saves. → What is Nextcloud
Team chat — Mattermost / Rocket.Chat. At a few dollars per user per month, SaaS chat adds up fast; a fixed-cost VPS does not scale with headcount. → Self-hosted team chat
Passwords — Vaultwarden. Cheap to run, and it removes a per-seat password-manager bill while keeping everyone on the official Bitwarden clients. → What is Vaultwarden
Automation — n8n. If you are paying per "task" for Zapier/Make, a self-hosted n8n flattens that cost. → What is n8n
Backups — MinIO/Garage + restic/rclone. An S3-compatible target you own is the backbone of a real backup strategy. → S3-compatible object storage
Monitoring — Uptime Kuma / Grafana. Know when your own services go down, without a per-check subscription.
Sometimes worth it (depends on your team)
Git hosting — Gitea/Forgejo/GitLab CE. If you already pay GitHub/GitLab per seat and have data-residency needs, self-hosting version control can pay off. Gitea/Forgejo are light; GitLab CE is heavier.
Email hosting — running your own mail server is the least rewarding self-hosting project, because deliverability is a constant battle. Many businesses self-host everything else but keep mail at a specialist. → Email DNS: SPF/DKIM/DMARC
Analytics — Plausible/Umami/Matomo. GDPR-friendly and privacy-respecting, but if you barely look at analytics, a hosted tool may be fine.
Usually NOT worth self-hosting (for a small team)
Your own email from scratch, unless you have the expertise — blocked mail costs more than a mailbox.
Heavy enterprise suites (full ERP/CRM) before you have the usage to justify the maintenance.
Anything you will not back up and update. Unmaintained self-hosted software is a liability, not an asset.
The honest trade
Self-hosting trades a subscription for responsibility: updates, backups, TLS, and the occasional 2 a.m. alert. The apps above are worth it because they run on a single VPS, are well documented, and replace bills that scale with people. Start with one (usually Nextcloud or Vaultwarden), get comfortable with the workflow — deploy, domain, TLS, backup — then add the next. Our getting started guide and the /app-hosting catalogue give you the deployment recipe for each.