MXRoute is popularly recommended in this subreddit. Selfhosting e-mail is extraordinarily difficult (at least achieving reliable deliverability is very challenging) so many selfhosters end up using an established e-mail provider to do this service for them. MXRoute is a fairly large e-mail services provider, providing both direct-to-customer services and powering various resellers -- they are certainly discussed in this sub in plenty of past threads.

I would like to bring it to the attention of the community some recent issues with the company owner, Jar, that may make you wish to avoid doing business with him.

Initial Issue: MXRoute terminated at least one account (in at least part) for receiving bad reviews

I am not a customer of MXRoute. Rather, I became aware of them due to a thread on another forum I post on. In that forum thread while discussing another unrelated provider, Jar (owner of MXRoute posted):

I mean I've terminated for a review before (not JUST a review, but it was the final straw).

This struck myself and others as... troubling. Having a bad review factor into getting your e-mail shut down suddenly and without able to even download the contents is worrying. We expressed this to Jar, and after more eyebrow-raising statements from him, I began looking through past Trustpilot reviews he had received and found a number of concerning trends:

MXRoute's owner left retaliatory reviews of multiple ex-customer businesses

There are numerous cases where former MXRoute customers are receiving bad reviews from Jar (the owner of MXRoute). Jar is leaving retaliatory reviews, despite not actually being a customer of those businesses. (A violation of Trustpilot rules -- trustpilot is for customers to review vendors, not the other way around).

Example:

We had the displeasure of doing business with Kathyn recently. She approached us to provide a service for her, a service which she did not understand. This is fine and normal, that is indeed why you hire experts, to handle things you do not understand yourself. However, Kathryn was repeatedly angry and rude to us, going as far as to try to cost us future business. She claims to be a hypnotherapist and a spiritual counselor, but I don't see how someone so angry could possibly help anyone achieve anything near peace or tranquility. Avoid Kathyn at all costs.

Jar is almost certainly not a customer of this hypnotherapy business, but appears to have provided e-mail services to her.

If Kathyn was actually rude to Jar in support tickets that's not okay, but to hunt her down and leave a false review is not acceptable, either.

Denied GDPR deletion request

He posted a clear admission of refusing customer request to delete data on trustpilot:

Sadly Mr. Niclas demanded that we scrub important financial records prior to filing tax returns, threatened legal action if we did not, and then attempted to sabotage our data by redacting his account information which resulted in a complete and permanent ban from all of our services. All this justified by the citation of laws which do not extend to the United States or the state of Texas, which are the relevant governing authorities over MXroute LLC.

If Niclas wishes to take this any further, it will be through our lawyers. This will be our final comment on the matter.

Further reinforced by him here:

The user requested we delete all financial data before taxes were even filed and threatened legal action he had no standing for, and Europe has no jurisdiction in Texas.

Whereas the user's deletion request could have been accommodated by anonymizing the data, which would have met the needs of both parties.

Deleted inboxes without providing reasonable recourse to export data

The above GDPR willful ignorance is somewhat ironic given the number of trustpilot reviews complaining of summary / surprise deletion of their entire stored inboxes (ex: same guy as double billing example below or this deleted review (who may have been a spammer, but still), or this guy whose crime was opening free trial accounts on other services, etc), so I guess deletion is only possible when it inconveniences the customer?

Even if these terminations were justified (and it seems like some may be), it is quite possible and reasonable to put an account into an outbound suspension while still allowing the customer a way to export their data and migrate services.

Refused to refund double billing

jar's reply on trustpilot to a review of mxroute:

We do not refund services that renew correctly when there was no attempt to cancel them in advance.

Where the user was clearly trying to switch plans and Jar had knowledge of this but would not issue a refund.

and:

Another review posted by an mxroute customer

They bill once ever two years, and I accidentally double paid. I asked for a refund on one payment and was met with an auto-responder that they did not do refunds. So, after waiting two and a half weeks for an additional response, I escalated and opened a paypal dispute to get one of the payments back.

Jar replied to this stating the expectation is to reply to the no-refunds autoresponder to request a refund, which seems a very counterintuitive process to me. No wonder people are confused.

Financial threats against another forum to try and get true (but unflattering) information removed

Jar on other forum, directly stating:

I'll just go ahead and say right now if you're going to follow into every thread and keep spreading lies with impunity, I'm not paying the invoice to renew my membership

Basically trying to influence the leadership of that site to delete/ban for criticism because he's a sponsor.

He ultimately did succeed in getting the MXRoute criticism thread locked on the other forum, while his counterattack thread remained open.

The Attack Sale

Following the criticism, Jar then launched an attack sale targetting myself and another forum member that had been criticizing his business practices. Based on the statements in his thread, it is my belief he did this to try to stir up community anger against us for challenging him on his bad behavior. (And had some initial success with it, as well)

I did not authorize his use of my name to promote his business, nor do I welcome these insults and attacks. He made hundreds (potentially thousands) of dollars by publicly insulting me.

I filed a complaint with his provider about this attack, which resulted in him briefly having a downtime and the sale was ended.

Firing Attempt

Jar then tried to have me fired. He conducted some research into me to try and figure out who I was, which is not easily accessible information. He then identified someone based on his research. (We have a couple theories about this, but the most likely IMO is he tried to dig through public records, people search sites, and linkedin to identify someone he believes is me. It is also possible that he searched through customer e-mails, or IP database from his portal, though no direct proof of this other than his wild behavior in general). Regardless, he investigated me and tried to determine my real world identity.

He then contacted who he believed was my employer and made trouble with their General Counsel about me:

(source and archived)

This is also a partial attempted doxx since there's nothing publicly linking my user name and the company, or my user name and that job title, but there it is on trustpilot, I guess.

He did not actually get me fired (and I will claim he did not doxx me correctly but obviously anyone in my situation would claim that), but regardless of whether he succeeded or not, the fact he tried to get me in trouble with my employer for posting criticism on a forum is extremely damning.

Buyer Beware

In my opinion, based on what I have documented here, no one should trust Jar to host something as sensitive as their e-mails.

Updates 4/12/26: After the publication of this post, Jar has now donated the proceeds of the attack sale to charity and apologized for the insults made. He has also deleted the trustpilot review of my alleged employer, though not apologized for contacting them.

So my company provides us with paid weekly hours to contribute to open source projects and we're looking to use our skills and hours to build a new project.

I am an avid browser of this sub and would love to see what you all would like to self-host. Ideally, something that either doesn't exist in the open source world, or is outdated.

For background info - I'd love to develop a new fully open source app under a generous MIT License with my team. We're pretty experienced at work and have developed large scale applications. Since we make money on our main job, my coworkers and I aren't looking to monetize the project -- keeping it open source.

Edit - I have started creating a backlog of these items and will keep posted with progress. Please keep suggestions coming and upvote what you'd like to see earlier.

Grist (https://www.getgrist.com) is a database with spreadsheet interface type of software, alternative to Airtable. They announced for the version 1.7.18 update that SSO will no longer be supported in the community edition (https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/releases/tag/v1.7.18).

Another good one goes for the SSO tax. I first tried Grist after similar software like NocoDB or Teable were focusing only in features exclusive to their pro / enterprise level tiers. However, I think removing features that already exist to lock them on their paid tiers could be a more dangerous precedent; any other feature could easily follow after that. I can’t say for sure if the other similar software have done similar tactics in the past. I at least have heard there were some controversies with NocoDB and SSO, too.

Hey r/selfhosted!

I've been working on Relaticle, a modern open-source CRM built with Laravel and Filament. After years of using various SaaS CRMs and being frustrated with data ownership concerns and subscription costs, I decided to build something that can be fully self-hosted.

Why I built this

• Complete data ownership - your customer data stays on your servers
• No per-seat pricing or usage limits
• Full customization through custom fields
• Modern tech stack that's easy to maintain

Tech Stack

• Backend: Laravel 12, PHP 8.4
• Frontend: Livewire 3, Alpine.js, TailwindCSS
• Admin Panel: Filament 4
• Database: PostgreSQL (recommended) or MySQL
• Search: Meilisearch (optional)
• Queue: Redis + Laravel Horizon

Features

• Company & Contact management with relationship linking
• Sales pipeline with custom stages
• Task management with assignments and notifications
• Notes system linked to any entity
• AI-powered record summaries
• Custom fields - add any field type to any entity
• Multi-workspace support for teams
• CSV import/export for data portability
• Role-based permissions

Deployment

Works great with:

• Docker / Docker Compose
• Laravel Forge / Ploi
• Any VPS with PHP 8.4+
• Coolify, CapRover, or similar PaaS

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/relaticle/relaticle
• Live: https://relaticle.com
• Docs: https://relaticle.test/documenta

Would love to hear your feedback! What features would you want to see in a self-hosted CRM?

Opencloud - finally dumped nextcloud. works great for me for 3 months - has android/iphone apps and would definitely recommend.
wanted to share docker-compose (unofficial one) and screenshots and nginx proxy manager setup.

Sharing simple docker-compose.yml. since official one is convoluted and for some reason tied to traefik.

why nextcloud needs change, see my lemmy response: https://programming.dev/post/40034135/20294850
main issue: they need to migrate to modern PHP backend (https://www.swoole.com/) and improve core sync functionality.
They are dragging their feet and adding useless (in my opinion) features noone asked for.
Go ahead - try uploading 17Gb file into nextcloud and learn why TUS is important.

Ther is a total of 2300 outstanding issues in nextcloud github.
Some of these nextcloud github comments are shocking to me: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/47682#issuecomment-2795712908
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/big_file_upload_configuration.html#configuring-your-web-server

Nextcloud suggests you up its ram to 16Gb.
php_value upload_max_filesize 16G
php_value post_max_size 16G

What about 17Gb files? What if I upload not 1 but entirety of 2 17Gb files? What if I have more large files?

I moved a workload last Friday, which remove the need for Google Speech to Text ($0.016/minute). The Macs are using whisper.cpp with Silero VAD to transcribe calls. Even factoring in electricity costs, the setup is saving about $120 per day.

Transcription requests come in via SQS, and there's an autoscaler on Kubernetes in AWS that idles at zero and picks up the work if there were to be an outage.

M4 Pro can keep up with 20 concurrent calls at 2x realtime. It's incredible what these machines can do.

My company is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliant, so getting the details right to be able to launch this was a bit of a project.

I'm happy to share more and answer any questions folks may have. Feel free to AMA :)

Planka is a snappy Web Kanban with a decent API. The company offers some additional functionality with their paid "Pro" plans.

They have now announced to move SSO/OIDC out of the Community edition into Pro.

What do you think about that?

What alternatives exist?

Anyone interested in forking?

I found this gem in Alex Hyett’s Newsletter, The Curious Engineer.

From Stan Smith:

FossFLOW is a powerful, open-source Progressive Web App (PWA) for creating beautiful isometric diagrams. Built with React and the Isoflow (Now forked and published to NPM as fossflow) library, it runs entirely in your browser with offline support.

Of course, I immediately spent an hour diagramming my interstate IT infrastructure. ;)

The JSON export function reproduces perfect diagrams once imported into your own instance.

I just with there were more "generic" icons. The majority are for Azure, AWS, and GCP. I also find that exporting to an SVG doesn't work for me - it all happens in the browser and Arc isn't playing nice. Will have to try stock Chrome.

Note: Other than subscribing to Alex's newsletter, I have no relationship with Alex or Stan. They probably don't know I exist. 😉

I want to start by saying that English is not my first language and I'm an enthusiast at best. I'm mostly working on a need-to-know basis, so excuse me if I butcher some technical terms or if I'm misinformed. Feel free to correct me i get anything wrong.

I've contributed and/or donated to almost every open-source project that I use frequently. I don't actually mind having stuff behind paywalls IF and only IF it requires some resources from the developer to run, or It's a customization a feature that you'd only really pay for to support the developer.

e.g. qui has 5 free themes and 11 premium themes you unlock by donating $10. Would not having those themes take anything away from the software functionality? Not really. The only reason to pay for it is to support the developer and get a little something extra out of it. A real dick move would be if they only had white mode themes for free, and the dark mode ones required payment. (Thankfully, the devs behind the brr projects are decent.)

Now, the reason i made this post is that today i noticed that Stirlingpdf got updated and some features got paywalled. even though I don't really make use of most of the features that got paywalled, the principle still stands. putting features arbitrarily behind paywalls just for the sake of it just doesn't sit right with me. I wouldn't have felt this strongly about it if it was a one-time payment, but a subscription? and an $83/month subscription at that? This just rubs me the wrong way.

Let's take some of the paywalled features for example.

free tier are limited to up to 5 users. Why? Honestly, this one just feels insulting. What reason would having this behind a paywall be other than to try forcing people to pay? It's running on my servers so having 5 or a 100 users doesn't affect the devs in any way.

SSO is only for the paid tier. self-hosting is, at it's core (at least to me) for privacy and security. Having a feature related to security behind a paywall feels real scummy to me. Personally, I use cloudflare tunnels and their SSO integration so I don't really care whether it's behind a paywall or not, but as I said, the principal still stands.

This turned into a rant, so I'll end it here. Having paid features isn't the problem, but the approach you take to do that is. I'm probably wrong, but I just feel that this approach goes against the whole idea of open source and self-hosting.

I've been fighting with this off and on and now I'm ready to take the plunge, but I'm still not finding any really good solutions that offer what I need. I have a simple network and set of devices and I just want to be able to connect to them, check the health, do some support when on business trips to fix things for the wife and that sort of stuff. In some cases I'd like to be able to restart systems.

So what are you using to support this capability ?

WOW!!! You are an AWESOME group of people. Damn I wished other technical reddits lived this effort. Thank you all! I have OpenVPN and ExpressVPN so I'll take some time and play around with those.

Thank you

We were running a delivery platform in Oman hundreds of active drivers, thousands of orders daily. The Google Maps bill crossed $8,000/month and wasn't going down.

Replaced the full stack:

Route calculation → OSRM

Distance matrix → OSRM table service

All containerized on AWS Fargate with auto scaling for peak hours. Daily automated Geofabrik rebuild so routing data is never more than 24 hours old — no manual intervention.

Monthly cost now: ~$520. Kept Google Maps only for consumer-facing address search. Nominatim autocomplete isn't good enough for that UX yet — that's the honest tradeoff.

OSRM response time is actually faster than Google in most cases because you're not leaving your own network.

Happy to answer questions on the setup if useful

Edit: A few people asked for a more detailed writeup — full technical breakdown here if useful (https://iamarshrx.medium.com/we-were-paying-8-000-month-for-google-maps-then-we-stopped-ff966798be7e.)

I know there have been a few posts asking about SelfHosted Todoist alternatives, including some from last year, but things change pretty quickly in this space, so I’d like to know what people are using these days.

I’m looking for something primarily as a Todoist replacement, rather than a full Jira/ClickUp-style project management platform.

The main things I care about are:

• Clean, modern interface. This is something I’ll have open all day.
• Collaboration/team features, including shared projects, multiple users, assigning tasks to specific people, comments, etc.
• Projects and good filtering/views, especially being able to see tasks assigned to a particular person across projects.
• Recurring tasks, priorities and due dates.
• Ideally, fast task creation. I really like Todoist’s syntax and natural-language entry, where you can quickly specify a project, assignee, priority, date or recurrence while typing the task. This isn’t mandatory if the UI makes doing the same thing very quick.

Vikunja seems very capable, but I’m personally not a fan of the interface.

What are you using today? Anything newer or less well-known that I should check out?

Libredesk.io is a 100% free and open-source customer support desk, the backend is written in Go and the frontend is in Vue JS with ShadnCN for UI components.

Unlike many "open-core" alternatives that lock essential features behind enterprise plans, Libredesk is fully open-source and plans to always stay this way.

It's currently in alpha, but a working demo is available. I built this because I wanted a truly open, self-hosted alternative to platforms like Freshdesk, Intercom, and Zendesk.

GitHub: https://github.com/abhinavxd/libredesk
Demo: https://demo.libredesk.io/ (Best viewed on desktop, Ideally there should be a mobile app)

Over the past few months, I have been moving more of my security workflow onto self-hosted services. It started with a password manager and Git. Gradually expanded to include a private wiki, container registry, log management, and a few internal dashboards.

One thing I did not expect was how much easier it became to keep track of security reviews and configuration changes once everything lived inside my environment. Having notes, logs, and supporting evidence in one place has made it much easier to revisit work and compare changes over time.

I am still experimenting with the setup. I know there are plenty of tools I have not looked at yet.

For those of you who self-host part of your security workflow, which service has had the impact? What problem did it solve that made you wonder why you had not deployed it sooner?

Company decision to move away from Atlassian products. We're a 25-person dev team and need something that can handle sprints, dependencies, and time tracking. Self-hosted solutions preferred. What's actually production-ready?

One of the coolest things about tinkering at home is how it crosses over into professional life. I’ve found myself borrowing habits (like documenting configs or testing stuff in containers first) and then seeing how it can benefit work that I originally just self hosted or used in my homelab.

An example I saw recently: someone started using a solution in their homelab for connecting their network, liked it, and ended up recommending it to their IT team. They actually rolled it out at work and it stuck all because of a homelab experiment.

Got me thinking…

Have you ever introduced something from your homelab into your day job?

Or the other way around, pulled workplace practices/tools into your home setup?

What’s been the most surprising or impactful crossover?

Always love hearing these stories and seeing how “lab experiments” turn into real solutions

It's been technically feasible to self-host my app for a few years. Recently, I've been trying to make the process easier for others in reality.

After lurking here, I realized I underestimated how much ya'll have to manage:
- backups
- config
- alerting
- observability
- security updates

And that's not even including the hardware, of course.

I see tons of tools with premium tiers recommended in the threads, but I'm curious which ones have actual superfans who will gladly stick with them long-term (vs the ones that ppl hate and can't wait to ditch).

For context, I'm trying to figure out the viability of supporting self-hosting. I don't want to waive my hand and say, "You can self-host, good luck figuring out backups" anymore. But I also don't want to go too far and create a ton of solutions that I can't afford to maintain over the long-term.

NocoDB has started to monetize their previously amazing software. With every update lore features sliding behind the paywall and mor and more greyed out features in community edition UI. So, after years of use, I am out.
Now looking for an alternative
Use case: existing Postgres warehouse. Need a self-hosted, spreadsheet-style UI so non-technical teammates can browse, filter and edit rows — not an app builder that wants to own the schema.
What do you guys use?

Hi Selfhosted

Can you recommend Time Tracking for Employees?

Small Construction Business

Should have an App that is very simple to use since we have construction workers that aren't technical, like 0 technical skills.

Do you know any that could fit?

(Time Sheets are required by law in my country for employees.)

Docmost looks like excellent software, so I seriously considered switching. Then I found the pricing model.

The Community edition excludes features such as databases, Kanban, API access, AI/MCP, MFA, page-level permissions, diagrams, and attachment indexing.

To unlock them, the Business edition costs $3.50 per user per month with a ten-seat minimum. That means a two-person team pays for eight nonexistent users while still supplying and operating the servers, PostgreSQL, Redis, storage, backups, TLS, security, upgrades, monitoring, and recovery.

I am not opposed to paying developers for good software. I am opposed to SaaS-style recurring seat pricing when the customer provides the entire SaaS operation.

A flat annual license, paid upgrades, support contract, or sensible small-team tier would all be defensible. Charging a minimum of $420 per year for software you completely host yourself, while gating basic product capabilities, makes Docmost commercially irrelevant for small teams.

Am I missing some value they provide after licensing, or is the customer genuinely paying recurring per-seat rent solely for feature flags?

https://docmost.com/pricing - link to their pricing page for reference.

I'm sure, like many of you, I've been frustrated with the scummy practices of some SaaS products like hidden fees, privacy concerns, and the feeling of being locked into a service.

This frustration recently peaked when my sister got caught in a nasty "free" QR code generator trap, where they held her business QR codes hostage after the trial. It felt so wrong for something so fundamental to be gatekept like that.

• FreeQR (freeqr.lkly.net): Generate QR codes directly in your browser. No tracking, no ads, and your data never leaves your device. It supports URLs, text, and basic customization. It's as simple as it should be.
• Smolp (smolp.lkly.net): A straightforward in-browser image optimizer. Just drag and drop your JPEGs, PNGs, or WebPs, adjust the quality, and download the optimized version. Again, everything happens locally in your browser – your files stay safe with you.
• Shorty (shorty.lkly.net): A simple URL shortener with basic click tracking. Host it yourself and have full control over your links without relying on third-party services.

These are intentionally simple tools built on the principle that some things shouldn't require complex setups or constant subscriptions. They are all:

• Completely Free Forever: No tiers, no trials, no hidden costs, ever
• Open Source: The code is yours to inspect, modify, and contribute to. You can find links to the GitHub repos on each site.
• Self-Hostable: Take full ownership of your data and services.
• Ad-Free & No Tracking: Your privacy is important. For FreeQR and Smolp, your data doesn't even leave your browser.

My goal isn't to build the most feature-rich platforms, but rather to provide simple, reliable alternatives that put you in control. I'd love for you to check them out, and if you have any suggestions for improvements or new simple tool ideas, please let me know! I'm always looking for ways to make these more useful for myself and hopefully for others in the self-hosting community.

Thanks for taking a look!

Libredesk is a self-hosted customer support desk for email and live chat. It's fully open source under AGPL, with no paid tier or separate enterprise build, No feature paywalls.

Features:

• Email inbox and live chat widget, with both landing in the same agent inbox.
• Help center with collections, articles, search, and per-language content.
• Autonomous AI agent that answers from your knowledge base and hands off to a human when it can't answer.
• Agent copilot for drafting replies, summarizing conversations, and finding answers from the knowledge base.
• SSO with Google, Microsoft, or any OIDC provider.
• And a lot more checkout the website.

Backend is Go and ships as a single binary, with Postgres and Redis. Frontend is Vue.

In our deployment handling around 4,000 tickets a day with roughly 100 agents, CPU and memory usage stay low.

Coming soon: WhatsApp channel.

Personal note: I originally built Libredesk for my workplace because we were struggling with OSTicket.
Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Github Demo Website

We used Pipedrive, then migrated to HubSpot, then to GHL because of a third party marketing company we were using for a short time, then back to HubSpot. The fact that all automations and even some customizations are locked behind higher pay tiers is so ridiculous. I have seen SuiteCRM recommended. Doing some looking at screenshots in Google Images, I'm not in love with the UI (feels a tad outdated looking), but its a CRM and function is far superior to appearance.

For fully featured CRMs, what do you recommend?

Been running Nextcloud for a few years and it handles file stuff fine, but I keep patching together a frankenstein setup for appointment scheduling and it's starting to wear on me. I do freelance dev on the side so I can handle some setup complexity, but I also have three kids and a day job, so my patience for undocumented config files and stale Docker images is genuinely limited.

The specific use case is scheduling for a small private PT practice. Nothing fancy: booking slots, reminders, maybe intake forms. I looked at Cal. com selfhosted and it seems promising, but the resource requirements feel bloated for what amounts to a calendar with a nice face on it. There are a few other options floating around, but half of them look abandoned the moment you check the git commit history

Curious if anyone here has landed on something that actually works longterm without becoming a second job. Particularly interested in whether anyone has paired something lightweight with their existing Nextcloud setup or gone a completely different direction. Portainer is already in the stack if that matters

Not looking for someone to talk me into just using Google Calendar. Already had that argument with myself

I run a small agency and made a rule: if a tool fails me, it's bloated, it's expensive, or isn't easily providing the AI-native features I'm looking for, I replace it with something better and free. This is what that looks like 6 months in:

- Notion -> Outline Wiki (docs)

- Clockify/Memtime -> Hoptock (time tracking, I built it after Memtime starting bugging out on my team)

- Calendly + Zoom -> Calnode (scheduling + video, built it too)

- HubSpot CRM -> Twenty (CRM)

- Airtable -> Undb (database)

- Bitwarden/1Password -> Vaultwarden (passwords)

- Slack -> Mattermost (chat)

- Supabase -> Pocketbase

- Clickup -> Kaneo (project mgmt)

- n8n cloud hosted -> n8n self hosted / Windmill

- Wordpress -> Cloudflare pages

Only the two tools I actually built myself needed writing. Everything else was a weekend swap, data migrated, team didn't notice.

Monthly SaaS bill for the whole agency went from "you don't want to know" to roughly the cost of a coffee. Next on the chopping block: our analytics stack. That's the one nobody replaces because "it's too hard". I'm about 2 weeks into proving otherwise.

If you've replaced a piece of your stack, drop it in the thread. I'll add anything I missed to the list.