Self-hosting is a commitment, not a checkbox

The appeal of self-hosting is easy to state: no subscription, no vendor holding your data, no feature you rely on being removed in a pricing change. All of that is real, and for some categories it is decisive. Photographs, passwords, and customer conversations are the obvious ones.

What the appeal leaves out is that the work does not disappear. Backups become yours. Certificate renewal becomes yours. Upgrades become yours, including the one that changes a database schema on a Friday. A hosted product charges for that work; self-hosting charges you in time instead, and time is the resource small teams are shortest of.

The honest version of the decision is per category rather than per organisation. Photo storage self-hosts well: the failure mode is inconvenience, and the data is easy to back up. Authentication self-hosts badly for most teams: the failure mode is everybody locked out, or worse, everybody let in.

Where a listing here says a project is self-hostable, that means the path exists and is maintained, not that it is the right choice for you. The tag tells you what is possible. The decision about whether to spend the time is still yours.