30+ Open Source Apps That Kill Your Subscriptions - The OwnOS App Store!

No one can cancel your app subscription if you host the open source code yourself! In this video I go through about 30 to 40 apps on the OwnOS App Store running on my Own1 at home. For pretty much every cloud service big tech sells you, there's already an open source app that's built, maintained and free to run on your own box.

Where do all these apps come from?

OwnOS is based on NixOS, a very efficient Linux distro. You have a small config file, download some packages, and it's deployed on your box the same reproducible, declarative way every time. That makes it super reliable for running hundreds of apps on one device. nixos.org lists over 150,000 packages, and a lot of those are the components that apps get built from.

The OwnOS App Store pulls those packages in and runs them locally. We try to feature and test the apps, making sure they run smoothly and no data is being sent back to anyone's cloud. Some category counts from the store:

Category	Apps
Networking and web	53
Photos and media	47
Productivity	41
File management	31
Databases	11

The OwnX team also build their own apps: Nexy (the AI assistant for the whole OS), Image Studio, Voice Studio for generating and cloning voices, Beat Studio for music, and OwnX Docs, a bucket for your PDFs that you can interrogate through Nexy.

How do I pick a good open source app?

I sort by GitHub stars, then check a few things before trusting anything:

• Stars are a decent signal, but some are botted, so watch out
• The latest release and commits per month, so you know it's not dead software
• Real contributors, which matters for security updates
• An open license that lets you use it commercially, especially if you're running a business
• The pricing page. Plenty of these have a cloud tier, the goal is the self-hosted version

And please don't try to vibe code all of this yourself. It's a lot of code and a lot of maintenance, so it's a waste of credits. If a project has a freemium tier for advanced features, I'd rather give my money to small open source teams than big tech. They've already got billions.

Which apps did I run through?

Some of the numbers I pulled up on GitHub along the way:

• n8n, visual automation like Zapier, around 200,000 stars
• Open WebUI, a chatbot front end, 157,000 stars, 22,000 forks, 883 contributors and 30 to 50 commits a day
• Ollama, my favourite model manager (I run it on my Mac too)
• ComfyUI for image, video and chat workflows
• Immich, basically Google Photos on your own box. I plugged in a 4 TB USB drive for about 150 bucks
• Stirling PDF, nearly 100,000 stars, so you don't have to pay Adobe
• Home Assistant, around 90,000 stars on the core repo
• Jellyfin, a Plex replacement with 60,000 stars and 1,529 contributors
• Coder, VS Code in the browser for your team and coding agents, 128,000 stars
• Trilium notes, nearly 40,000 stars and 408 contributors
• Glance, a self-hosted feed dashboard, nearly 40,000 stars
• Qdrant vector database, 35,000 stars and 222 contributors

Plus Uptime Kuma, Syncthing, Caddy, Vaultwarden, Memos (MIT licensed), MeiliSearch, Gitea, Mastodon, Metabase, Discourse, RSSHub, LibreChat, Headscale, qBittorrent, Outline, Umami, Nextcloud, HashiCorp Vault and RustFS for S3-compatible storage. Also IronClaw (the NEAR AI secure take on OpenClaw), a Minecraft server and a NEAR validator, which I'm covering in upcoming videos.

How much can you actually save?

This is where it adds up for a small business. Google Workspace runs $15 to $30 a user per month, and Nextcloud covers docs, spreadsheets, drive, calendar, chat and video calls on your own server. We used to pay $100 a month to keep a Discourse forum going, and on NixOS it's basically a one-click install.

A few honest warnings too. Running your own Mastodon server means moderating and blocking spammers, which is a lot of work. Headscale is a back-end techy thing that most small business owners will want someone on the team to set up. And if you plug LibreChat or Open WebUI into a cloud API, your data goes to the cloud, so point them at local inference on the Own1.

If you want a Metabase project with a local chatbot as a full tutorial, comment and let me know!

Grab the Own1 at checkout.ownx.co and comment "Own AI" for my 10% off voucher. Stay sovereign and see you in the next one!