25 Trending Self-Hosted Projects on GitHub

At some point, paying $12/month for a notes app that holds your grocery lists starts to feel absurd. Not because $12 is a lot of money, but because you are a developer. You know what a database is. You know what a Docker container is. And somewhere in the back of your head, you know there is a perfectly good open-source tool sitting on GitHub that does the same thing, runs on a $5 VPS, and does not require you to accept a new privacy policy every six months. That is the self-hosting pitch, and in 2026 it has never been more convincing. The tooling is genuinely excellent now. Deployment is usually a compose file and ten minutes. And the community producing these projects is large, active, and moves fast. Here are the 25 projects worth knowing about right now. AI and Local LLM Tools 1. Ollama Stars: 139k | Language: Go GitHub: https://github.com/ollama/ollama Press enter or click to view image in full size Ollama is where most people start with local AI, and for good reason. You run one