My work on Dawarich and my constant presence on r/selfhosted made me realize one important thing. Important to the ones who want to build a product that is going to be used by actual people and get paid for it, that is. We’re calling them indiehackers in 2025.
Anyway, the important thing: self-hosted opensource software might be your way to market. That’s all.
I may face a risk of flooding self-hosting sphere with low-effort vibe-coded garbage applications, but that’s unlikely, simply due to the fact I don’t have that much of an audience to push this idea to. So I’m okay with that. Another thing is that it may actually benefit from all those garbage apps: somebody may see an application concept and say “I like the idea, it’s what I need, but the implementation is just terrible. I’ll do better”, and just do that. Profit for all.
So, let me dig deeper into this idea I came up with.
First, we have to outline what self-hosting is. I think I won’t be wrong if I describe it as a niche hobby, mostly for geeks, sometimes (quiet often) IT professionals, who like to have full ownership over their data. And they usually love tinkering with hardware. It’s not rare for them to have some kind of servers (often old office PCs) at home where they run some kind of virtualization that allows them to run any sorts of applications, usually in Docker. And they are passionate about. I know because I’m one of them.
Second, since self-hostable software (a good one, IMO, okay) is as easy to spin as copy-paste a docker compose file and run a single docker compose up, it doesn’t take much time or effort to do so. Found something interesting -> copypasted the compose file -> ran the command, done. You can experiment with the software. It brings us to the low effort aspect of self-hosting.
What do we have so far? Passionate audience, low friction. Moving on.
The r/selfhosted subreddit is one of the most active on Reddit. I’d even go as far as saying it’s one of the most kind and encouraging. I’ve seen nothing but support from these people and it feels good to be part of this community, so I kinda know what I’m talking about. And, since people there are active, it provides us with the third aspect: access (3) to the passionate audience (1) with low friction to try new things (2). I’d say it’s almost a recipe for success.
So let’s get back to the idea I’m presenting you here for a moment. If you a developer or an enthusiast, who tries to come up with a product and get paid for it, I just provided you with a perfect sandbox to try your ideas. Here’s what you gonna do:
- Come up with an idea (the hardest part)
- Build the MINIMAL viable product (one function)
- Publish it on Github (make it open source) + build a docker image + provide with a low effort way to spin it up (docker compose file)
- Make a post at r/selfhosted.
Making the post, be yourself, be friendly. Tell people what problems you’re solving with your product. Be open to feedback, answer to comments, listen to what people have to say about what you made.
You’ll see if it got traction and positive feedback in a few hours after posting. From that moment, you have some options:
- If it went unnoticed, maybe you made something useless. Or presented it in a suboptimal way. Consider posting later, with some updates you made to your software and see for reaction.
- If you got positive feedback, you might be up to something. You can continue working on your product and see how it goes.
- If people are absolutely loving your product, go for it! You found what you were looking for, now it’s time to build and market.
Mind you, we’re talking about open source software. You’ll have to come up with a way to monetize it, if you’re after some reward. That’s normal. You can create a Patreon page so people could donate, or you can go full-SaaS mode and try to make an actual business out of it. There are some options: subscription (example: Dawarich, Postiz), selling a license (example: Immich, Plex), some other monetization models you can come up with. Make sure to spend some time thinking about it. Or don’t, you can just have it as a hobby and get some donations, absolutely nothing wrong with it.
All I wanted to say, is that self-hostable open source software is a nice and valid way to test the waters and see if your idea worth anything at all.