Tedium - Self-Host All the Things? 🖥️

Today in Tedium: Recently, I got a bit of a shocking message in the form of a bill. The bill came from a company named Zapier, which produces a tool for automating tasks of all kinds, such as uploading images to a website or adding lines of text to a spreadsheet. This tool was great for a long time, but then the company decided to raise the price out of nowhere. And not by a little, but by more than three times the cost of what I was paying. I immediately cut back the plan to the minimum needed in response to this unexpected price increase, which honestly kind of upset me a lot. This got me thinking: Why pay all this extra money to another software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that doesn’t necessarily have my best interests at heart? Is there a better way? So, with that in mind, I’ve been doing some research on tools that I think could be replaced with open-source alternatives without too much trouble, as long as the tools make sense for my needs. But, as always, the rub is always there. Today’s Tedium considers open-source alternatives to a few common categories of software-as-a-service tools. — Ernie @ Tedium

(Internet Archive Book Images/Flickr)

Too hot or too cold? Our ranking system for self-hosted apps

Today’s issue will ponder each of these open-source alternative categories by offering three alternatives that fit a “Goldilocks model”—too hot, too cold, or just right. Our goal with this list is not to shame projects, but to offer feedback on what might make a tool a better fit for a broader audience.

For these tests, we either installed the applications locally using docker or ddev, tested demo versions of each given tool, or spun up cloud instances on Hetzner to give each tool a spin in a live environment. I have tried a number of cloud services over the years, and my recommended suggestion for most of these is either to put them on a small machine if it’s for hobby reasons, install them on a cloud service like Hetzner if it’s public-facing, and invest more deeply if it’s more heavyweight.

I’m pretty good at setting up tools at this point, having done so using esoteric approaches such as Node, Rails, and Laravel (along with the ever-present LAMP stack). I’ve set up a Mastodon server on my own, even. If I couldn’t install it, or I had an unnecessary amount of trouble, I’m going to tell you. (Foreshadowing …)

(Brett Jordan/Unsplash)

Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick

As we’ve written many times, you don’t need to use a service like Mailchimp, or even a service like Substack. Email is email—it’s the water of the internet, in that it flows everywhere. You can send it however you want.

If you’ve ever looked at different email tools as I have, you’ll know that the problem is not a lack of options but a glut of them, and this is true even of the open-source options. The problem is, email newsletter software is in this weird state where most of the tools are either too old and mature or fairly new and untested.

This space is such that you might want to also consider some of the paid alternatives, such as Sendy, which has many of the bells and whistles of SaaS tools but can be self-hosted and even integrated with WordPress. I’m not recommending Sendy, but only because I want to lean towards FOSS in this as much as I can. I know a lot of people who use it and have good experiences, though.

Anyway, after some looking around, I have to say that it’s kind of a crapshoot—a mixture of tools that are arguably a bit overgrown and tools that are so new that they feel like their chances of long-term survival are low.

(Listmonk)

With each of these, you have a number of options, but you will likely be working in the confines of an existing service like Mailgun or Amazon SES to actually send the emails. So sure, you’ll be doing the self-hosting yourself, but Amazon will be managing the message sends for you. You actually want this, because hosting on a new domain can get very costly.

Anyway, a few options to identify:

One challenge I often see with email tools is the ability to manage spam, and with that in mind, I plan to give ListMonk and Keila some deeper tests to determine what’s possible with both of them. I have ended up having to pay for an additional service to manage email lists just because of spam issues, and I would like to stop doing so.

Calendar-booking tools: Let’s stick with Calendly for now

Honestly, this was the category I felt had the most potential to be pretty cool, but after a terrible, hours-long process of attempting to install a particular tool, I am just not going to recommend anything here.

Which is too bad. Calendly is a concept that could use FOSS-based disruption, or at least a reasonable alternative. However, there just isn’t anything out there that I feel comfortable saying is worthy of your time.

There’s something that I would have liked to recommend, but I couldn’t get it correctly installed, I imagine that a lot of you won’t be able to do the same. Anyway, here’s what I’ve got:

There’s something to be said for open principles and for carrying your application like it’s open in spirit, and something else to be said for the rubber meeting the road.

(Cal.com)

Cal.com, unfortunately, was stuck hovering above the road. I tried three separate methods to get it to install Cal.com, including my preferred Docker setup and its recommended Railway method, and it gave me issues at every turn. (Whatever the technical reasons, changing your domain should not be as big a hurdle as it is.)

Their tool may just not be ready for prime time for self-hosters—though if you want them to host it, it might still be a good choice. But as this is a self-hosting guide, I have to call this out, unfortunately.

Suggesting an option like NextCloud, which is essentially a huge suite of tools, might be way too much for most people. But it’s a lot closer than Cal.com at this time, unfortunately.