Self-Hosted Apps Without a Server

You want a password manager, an RSS reader, a recipe box and a dashboard. You don't want a VPS, an SSH key, a compose file, or a Sunday lost to certificate renewal. Selfhosting without the suffering, in other words.

Several companies now sell exactly that. Here's what they charge, and which one to pick for what.

What does it cost to run several apps?

Most people don't want one app. They want a handful, and the gap between providers widens sharply as that number grows, because they charge in different shapes. We sell a plan with a number of slots, PikaPods and Elestio charge per app, and NodStack sells tiers that cap how many run at once.

Monthly, before tax, for that many apps running at once. NodStack converted from EUR at 1.154: their tiers are EUR 4.99 for one app, EUR 12.99 for three and EUR 24.99 for six, so four apps means the top tier. PikaPods figures use its median catalogue starting price of $2.70 per app, where its cheapest start at $1.80 and its dearest reach $11.80. Because PikaPods also bills by resource use, a busy app can cost more than its starting price.

What do you actually get for $9?

The $9 plan runs any four apps from the collection at once. A reasonable starter set:

• Vaultwarden for passwords
• FreshRSS or Miniflux for feeds
• Mealie for recipes
• Homepage to tie the lot together

You pick them from the collection and each one gets its own address, like yourname-mealie.elfhosted.com, reachable with your ElfHosted login and nobody else's. Change your mind next week and you can swap any of them for Linkding, Uptime Kuma, Actual, Wiki.js or anything else in the collection, at no extra cost.

Running them side by side, they get to know each other: Uptime Kuma pushes its alerts into your own ntfy or Gotify, and Homepage, Homarr or Glance will tile the rest of your stack on one screen.

Browse the app collection

How does ElfHosted compare to NodStack?

NodStack sells the same thing we do: a plan with app slots, a private HTTPS address, updates handled for you, and restore points.

They sell three tiers: EUR 4.99 for one app running at a time, EUR 12.99 for three, and EUR 24.99 for six. Flex Pro runs 18 for $29.

Their entry tier is cheaper than ours in absolute terms: EUR 4.99 for a single running app, against $9 for four. If one app is all you want, that's the better buy. Above one app the gap opens quickly, because their middle tier stops at three, so a fourth app means moving to the top tier at about $28.84.

Worth checking against your own use: NodStack pools app storage per plan, at 5GB, 25GB and 50GB across the three tiers. Every Flex plan includes 100GB.

How does it compare to PikaPods?

PikaPods has the larger catalogue, around 130 apps, and it's the cheapest way to run one or two light apps.

Its billing is per app and partly by the resources each app uses, so a heavy app costs more than a light one and your bill moves with what you're running. Flex is flat: a demanding app takes the same slot as a small one, within the same per-app resource limits, and your bill doesn't move. Which of us works out cheaper depends on which apps you pick and how many slots you fill, so it's worth pricing your own shortlist both ways.

What about Elestio, OpenHosst and InstaPods?

Elestio puts each service on its own dedicated VM from $11 per month per service, across 400+ titles. That's managed infrastructure for a business rather than a personal app plan, and at four apps it costs nearly five times what Flex does.

OpenHosst is built around managed n8n hosting from $2.99 per month, with a small catalogue growing around it. If n8n is the one thing you want, compare them directly.

InstaPods targets developers deploying their own code, with a couple of dozen marketplace apps alongside. If you're shipping something you wrote, that fits better than any catalogue host.

What's included with every Flex plan?

• HTTPS on your own subdomain, for every app you run
• One login to reach all of them. Every app sits behind your ElfHosted account, so nobody else reaches the door. Some apps keep their own account inside that, which you set up once on first run
• Sam, the assistant in your dashboard. He looks at your actual apps rather than guessing, so he'll tell you why one is misbehaving, and he can restart it for you. He asks before changing anything, and your secrets are stripped out before anything reaches the AI. Install him to your phone's home screen and he'll push you a notification when something needs you. More in how to get help
• A choice of datacenter. The default is the EU and there's a US cluster. Run a speed test and move yourself between them from your account page, whenever you like
• 100GB of app storage, shared across everything you run, which is far more than this sort of app will ever ask for. Apps that work with files can also mount your own cloud storage over rclone, so you're never boxed in
• Nightly backups into your own backup volume, which you can browse yourself
• Monitoring and updates handled for you
• Support from the elves who build and run the platform, in a Discord where they answer

Switching an app off frees its slot and changes nothing about your bill, and its data stays where it is. Turn it back on in six months and your data is as you left it. Keep it secret, keep it safe, and so on.

When should you choose someone else?

• The app you want isn't in the collection. This is the big one, and no amount of pricing maths fixes it. Both PikaPods and Elestio list more apps than we do, so check the collection against your shortlist before anything else.
• You want one light app and nothing more. PikaPods or NodStack will cost you less than our $9 entry.
• You need a dedicated VM per service. Elestio is built for that, and we're not.
• You're deploying your own code rather than a packaged app. InstaPods fits better.

At one or two apps, we're not the cheapest.

Do you give anything back to the projects?

We package software other people wrote, and we'd rather they were paid for it. ElfHosted has sponsored open-source developers across its catalogue for years, with an ongoing sponsorship, free hosting for their public instance, or both.

Who we back is listed in full on our sponsorship page, and verifiable on GitHub and OpenCollective.

Which plan should I pick?

Four apps for $9, ten for $18, or eighteen for $29, and you can move between plans later. Every plan starts with a 7-day trial for $1. Paid a year up front, Flex Pro works out at $1.29 per app per month.

Pay by card or PayPal, or top up your balance with Bitcoin and save 10%. Every renewal earns you ElfPoints worth 20% of what you paid, which you can spend on another subscription or put towards the next one.

Compare Flex plans Browse the app collection