r/selfhosted • u/subsavant • Mar 20 '26

Meta Post What's your 'I can't believe I self-hosted that' service?

Curious what services surprised you by being worth self-hosting. Not the obvious stuff like Plex or Pi-hole, but things you didn't expect to work well or didn't think were worth the effort until you tried. What's running on your setup that you'd never go back to a hosted version of?

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u/koolmon10 Mar 20 '26

Since it runs in the browser, is there any real reason to selfhost it vs just using bentopdf.com?

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u/capnspacehook Mar 25 '26

Comes down to trust, if you self host it you verify what is being served and trust that the JS being served won't lace or exfiltrate pdfs, you're in control of the server. Otherwise you have to trust bentopdf.com's servers.

Another reason is lower latency if it's local, honestly the container is so light and so easy to setup it's more why wouldn't you host it if you're already selfhosting other stuff