A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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This is like asking why no speaks one language saying, " I don't understand how/why people speak different languages."
Tons of reasons, some geographical, some political to some biblical, and other just out of spite.
To answer your statement... Tons of reasons; some listed already but too many to state. I suggest you research more and it'll help you understand why.
Mainly for control and privacy of our data so it doesn’t get stolen or others don’t bank off of selling our data
You don't sound stupid at all!
Before switching to Actual budget, I used YNAB. Just an app to install that works on my phone and on my PC.
It's all synced to the cloud so the same data appears on both devices.
But, I'm tied to YNAB's choices. They decided to increase prices, so I had to find something else.
Instead, Actual is completely controlled by me. None of my data with anyone else, no price, no subscription, no concern that changes will be forced on me that I don't like. It's all in my control.
That's why I would rather self-host a budgeting software than just install one.
I think most of the answers here are kinda lame. It's not easier to deal with networking rules or backups or flakey consumer grade Internet or power outages or redundancy or a lot of other things.
The only things I find value in self hosting are functional things for the home.. A bittorrent client with web front end, plex server, file server for the plex server, a home automation stack, or as a cheap sandbox for testing new software..
You'd save a lot of time and energy just using web or mobile based apps where appropriate. The day to day reliability of those kind of apps will be better as well.
If someone is doing this for a hobby, great. Enjoy. It's not practical for the overwhelming majority of people though. I say this as someone who's literal job is ensuring reliability of web services.. I am more than capable of doing all this but I'm also practical about seeing when it's a net benefit vs a time/energy suck.
I dont understand it either. I host on a VPS, because I trust my hoster more than my ISP and more than my own security-skills. Also its cheaper than running own hardware.