Most self-hosted apps weren’t built for self-hosting. They’re the SaaS product, open sourced and thrown over the wall, and you inherit everything that made sense for the SaaS at scale.
Take Sentry, the one most of us have tried to run at some point. Its own README calls the self-hosted repo “Sentry, feature-complete and packaged up for low-volume deployments and proofs-of-concept”. Open the docker-compose file in the August 2025 release and count. 72 services. Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Kafka, ClickHouse, and 40 consumers and forwarders moving events between them. The docs ask for 4 CPU cores, 16 GB of RAM plus 16 GB of swap, and recommend 32 GB. That is the single-node version, with one Kafka broker. It’s the machine you rent to keep the error messages of an app that runs on a 2 GB box.
None of that is a mistake on Sentry’s side. Kafka and ClickHouse are what you need to take errors from a hundred thousand customers at once, and the packaging is honest about who it’s for. The mistake is ours. We take a system sized for a hundred thousand tenants and run it for one.
It’s like buying an interplanetary rocket to get across town. Sure, it’s impressive. You still have to fuel it.
What self-hosting a business tool should give you is your data on a machine you control, and a maintenance load one person can carry without thinking about it. A tool built for that looks nothing like a SaaS backend. One process. One file for the data. A restart that takes a second, and a backup that is a copy.
That’s the constraint I built Fusionaly under. It runs on Docker with a SQLite file inside, no database server, and 512 MB of RAM is enough. Ask, the plain-English query feature, runs on your own OpenAI key, so there is no metered usage waiting to surprise you. Trying it is one command, a DevBox that starts the server and a demo site on localhost:8080. You pay once and own it.
Before you run the next self-hosted tool, open its compose file and count the services. Each one is something you’re on call for, and you are the only one on call.