Open Source
Open-source and self-hosted software, and how to actually run it. This category covers projects you can clone, inspect and host yourself: SEO toolkits, AI automation libraries, developer utilities, and the communities that keep them alive.
The posts here go past the README. They cover what a project does, what you need in place before you start, the installation steps in order, and the practical trade-offs against the commercial alternative — cost, control over your own data, how far you can customise it, and the level of support you can realistically expect.
Self-hosting is not free. It trades a subscription for your own time and infrastructure. Someone has to apply the updates, watch the logs, and be there when it breaks on a Friday evening. For a small team that cost is real, and it does not appear on any pricing page.
The questions worth asking before adopting a project are usually the same ones: how recently was it committed to, how many people can merge changes, what happens to your data if the maintainer walks away, and how hard is it to get back out again. Where the answers are known, the write-ups say so, and where a project is a single-maintainer effort, that is stated plainly rather than glossed over.
These write-ups are meant to make that trade explicit, so you can tell which projects are worth the effort and which are better left to a paid tool.
