A modest VPS — 4-8GB RAM, a few vCPUs, $20-$40/month — has enough headroom to run a surprising number of lightweight self-hosted tools side by side, as long as each one is containerized and sitting behind a shared reverse proxy. Here's a realistic stack.
The lineup
- Uptime Kuma — uptime monitoring with status pages. Replaces $10-$30/mo monitoring SaaS.
- Vaultwarden — a Bitwarden-compatible password manager server. Replaces per-seat password manager pricing.
- n8n — workflow automation, a self-hosted Zapier alternative. Usage-based SaaS pricing gets expensive fast; self-hosted is flat.
- Umami or Plausible — privacy-focused analytics, replaces analytics SaaS with per-pageview pricing.
- Gitea — lightweight self-hosted Git hosting, useful for private repos you don't want on a third-party platform.
- Filebrowser — a simple web file manager for the VPS itself.
- Adminer — a database admin UI, useful for the Postgres/MySQL instances the other tools need.
- Ntfy — push notifications for scripts and monitors, replacing a paid notification service.
- Linkding — self-hosted bookmarks, if you're trying to get off a browser-sync service.
- FreshRSS — an RSS reader, for anyone who still keeps up with the internet the old way.
Why this actually fits on one box
None of these are resource-heavy individually — most idle at well under 100MB of RAM and only spike briefly under load. The constraint is usually disk (databases growing over time) long before it's CPU or RAM. A modest VPS with each service in its own container, sharing one Postgres/MySQL instance where possible, comfortably runs this whole list with room left over.
The part that actually takes the time
Not running the containers — routing them. Ten apps means ten domains or subdomains, ten TLS certificates, and keeping track of which container maps to which route. That's the same reverse-proxy problem covered in our Traefik + Docker guide, just multiplied by ten.
Making it manageable
This is where a deploy tool earns its keep even for "boring" self-hosted tools, not just your own apps. DeployOS ships most of the list above as one-click templates — pick the tool, pick the domain, it handles the compose file, the network wiring, and the HTTPS certificate. If you're paying monthly for tools on this list, it's worth checking whether your existing VPS (or a $20 one) has room to bring them in-house.