Dashlane sent me a renewal notice. $120 for the year.
Two years earlier? I paid $12.
Same features. Same product. 10x the price because they could.
I exported my passwords that night and built my own stack instead.
That's when I stopped renting my infrastructure from companies that could change the deal whenever they wanted. I started owning it.
Self-hosting open-source projects isn't some extreme DevOps move. Railway has a generous free tier and charges you only for what you actually use. Most of these tools cost me nothing. The ones that do? Maybe five dollars a month total.
You can also run these on a Raspberry Pi sitting in your closet, an old laptop, or any machine with some RAM, storage, and network access. No cloud provider needed if you don't want one.
Here are the six projects I actually use every day. Full control. Zero subscription fatigue. Code I can fork if I need to.
Small Disclaimer: Not a promotion for Railway or anything, just some love for a platform who is trying to be unique and consumer friendly in the industry.
1. Vaultwarden + Bitwarden (Password Manager)
Replaces: LastPass, Dashlane, 1Password
Cost: $0 on Railway free tier
License: GPLv3 (open source)
Bitwarden's premium service costs $10/year. Dashlane wanted $120.
Vaultwarden is a lightweight, open-source implementation of the Bitwarden server. Same apps, same browser extensions, same everything. But the vault lives on your server.
When Dashlane raised prices, I had no choice but to accept or leave. With Vaultwarden, if development stops tomorrow, I fork it. The passwords are mine. The encryption keys are mine. Nobody's holding them hostage for a subscription renewal.
2. Ollama + Llama Models (Local Code Reviews)
Replaces: GitHub Copilot code review features, paid AI assistants
Cost: Runs locally (free), or Railway $5/month for remote access
License: MIT (Ollama), various for models
I was burning through Claude credits reviewing pull requests and refactoring code. Ollama with Llama 3.2 runs on my laptop. Instant code reviews, no API costs, zero latency waiting for responses.
The code never leaves my machine. Proprietary projects, client work, experimental features—all reviewed locally without touching third-party servers.
When you're iterating fast, that privacy and speed matters more than you'd think.
Btw if you want me to make this an open source project, don’t forget to comment below.
3. Memos + Moltbot (Writing & Quick Notes)
Replaces: Notion quick capture, Apple Notes, Google Keep
Cost: $0 on Railway free tier
License: MIT (open source)
Notion's great until you need offline access or want your notes as actual markdown files you control.
Memos is stupid simple. Markdown-based, tagged, searchable. Moltbot automates publishing and organization. I draft article ideas during meetings, tag them for later, and my entire writing backlog lives in plain text files I can grep through.
No vendor lock-in. No proprietary formats. Just text files I own.
4. Gitea (Private Git Hosting)
Replaces: GitHub private repos, GitLab hosted plans
Cost: Railway $5/month handles multiple repos easily
License: MIT (open source)
GitHub owns your private repositories. Microsoft can read them, train models on them, change API access whenever they want.
Gitea gives you Git hosting, issues, pull requests, and webhooks on your infrastructure. I use it for side projects I'm building before they're ready to ship, experiments I don't want public yet, and tools I'm tinkering with that might never see the light of day.
When you're in that messy exploration phase—trying ideas, breaking things, figuring out what works—you don't want that on public GitHub. And you definitely don't want to pay for private repos when you can host them yourself.
When GitHub changes their terms or pricing, I don't care. My code isn't there.
5. Linkding + Custom MCP Server + Claude (Research System)
Replaces: Raindrop.io Premium, Pocket Premium, Instapaper
Cost: $0 on Railway free tier + Claude usage (which I was already paying)
License: MIT (Linkding, open source)
This is where it gets interesting.
I built a custom Claude MCP server that connects to my Linkding instance. When I'm writing an article, Claude can pull from every research link I've saved, tagged, and archived over the past months.
Raindrop.io Premium wanted $28/year for full-text search and tagging. With Linkding, I get that plus a direct pipeline into my AI workflow. The research I do for one article becomes accessible context for every future article.
My second brain isn't trapped in some startup's database. It's queryable, backed up, and integrated into the tools I already use.
6. Pairdrop (File Sharing)
Replaces: AirDrop, WeTransfer, Dropbox file requests
Cost: $0 on Railway free tier
License: GPLv3 (open source)
I'm constantly moving files between my laptop, phone, and desktop. Screenshots for articles, code snippets, mockups.
AirDrop only works on Apple devices. WeTransfer limits file sizes. Dropbox wants $12/month for features I need once a week.
Pairdrop runs in a browser. Open it on any device, drag and drop. Files transfer peer-to-peer through your local network, or via your Railway instance if you're remote. No Bluetooth pairing, no account creation, no file size limits.
It just works.
Honorable Mentions
Umami (Analytics for Shipped Projects)
Replaces: Google Analytics, Fathom, Plausible paid tiers
Cost: $0 on Railway free tier
License: MIT (open source)
I run Umami for terminalsnap.online—a tool I built for generating beautiful terminal screenshots for documentation and social media. Clean metrics showing me which features people actually use, what browsers they're on, where traffic comes from. No cookies, no tracking users across the web.
Google Analytics is free because you're selling your users' data. Fathom and Plausible charge $14-19/month for privacy-respecting analytics.
Umami gives you the same insights without making your readers the product, and it costs nothing to run on Railway's free tier.
Vikunja + Custom MCP Server (Project Management)
Replaces: Todoist Premium, Asana, ClickUp
Cost: $0 on Railway free tier
License: AGPLv3 (open source)
Todoist Premium costs $58/year. Vikunja gives me the same task management features for free.
But here's the thing. I didn't like the UI. So I forked the repo and changed it.
That's the real power of open source. If something annoys you, you don't file a feature request and wait. You open the code and fix it yourself.
I added my own UI tweaks, integrated a custom MCP server for automation, and now I have a version of Vikunja that works exactly how I think. Nobody else in the world has this exact version. It's mine.
Who Actually Benefits From This
Software developers like me who are tired of subscription fatigue.
You're paying $10/month for GitHub, $20/month for productivity tools, $15/month for analytics, $10/month for a password manager, $30/month for file storage. Before you realize it, you're $100+/month deep in SaaS subscriptions.
I was paying over $150/year just on the tools I replaced with this stack. Now? Railway costs me maybe $5-10/month total, depending on usage.
But honestly, it's not even about the money.
When Dashlane raised prices 10x overnight, I had no recourse. Accept it or leave. When Evernote pivoted and features disappeared, people lost access to years of notes. When Mint shut down, users scrambled to export financial data.
Self-hosting open-source projects means you're immune to those decisions.
Fork it. Host it. Own it. The code lives on your server. If a project dies, you maintain your fork. If pricing changes, you don't care. You're not a customer anymore.
The Bottom Line
You don't need to be a DevOps engineer to self-host. Railway makes it dead simple. Most of these projects have one-click deploy buttons. (Again Not a promotion).
The psychological shift from "I hope this company doesn't change pricing" to "I control this infrastructure" is massive.
You stop optimizing around what SaaS vendors allow and start building, what you actually need.
Just Own it.
That's exactly what I'd like you to take away from this article.
Couple of Mentions 🔥
I recently created an open source web app, TerminalSnap, to create beautiful and gorgeous screenshots for your terminal. Totally free! Its in active stage and my aim is to make it a go-to app for terminal screenshots. So a lot more to come (including Excalidraw styled hand drawn terminal themes 👀)!
I just launched my own Weekly Substack newsletter where you’ll find a lot more similar stories(in future), tips & tricks, foundational knowledge and tools from my own experience to help you along with your own journey.
Best Part? One Coffee at a time! And Its totally free!
I Promise!
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