Kimai

The price everyone charges for time-tracking is insanity when Kimai is available. I self host this behind a cloudflare tunnel and it's the easiest $20/month we save. I've even seen it available on CPanel, managed hosting installations. It's a no-brainer for a freelancer.

Kimai Time-Tracking
Kimai - free and easy time-tracking for freelancer, agencies and companies with user and invoice handling.
https://www.kimai.org

Flame Dashboard

When you have a network of contractors and a bunch of cobbled together services, this self hosted dashboard helps keep things straight.

GitHub - pawelmalak/flame: Flame is self-hosted startpage for your server. Easily manage your apps and bookmarks with built-in editors.
Flame is self-hosted startpage for your server. Easily manage your apps and bookmarks with built-in editors. - pawelmalak/flame
https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame

Twenty CRM

I tried to self host this unsuccessfully, I'm a poor-to-moderate IT guy so I've happily started paying them to manage. Having an affordable, easy CRM has been so helpful. I have less than 100 contacts in there right now but with my small business don't need many more.

Twenty - The #1 Open-Source CRM
Twenty is a modern, open-source CRM alternative to Salesforce—fully customizable, affordable, and powered by the community.
https://twenty.com

N8N + Baserow

I use N8N for a few CRM automations, some social posting and experimentation (how about an Adobe Media Encoder node?!) but the star of this show is an app I made called SendIT.

Using templates I create on my Ghost blog, I've created a grip of custom emails I use when sending things to clients. I have templates for download and review links, delivery of assets, pitches and package tracking numbers. N8N runs the backend, Baserow made it easy to create a front-end. Highly recommended.

n8n.io - AI workflow automation tool
n8n is a free and source-available workflow automation tool
https://n8n.io
Baserow - Open source no-code database
Discover Baserow, the open-source no-code platform for building databases and applications. No code or technical skills needed. Start creating for free today!
https://baserow.io

Bookstack

I've put a ton of our information that gets re-used by producers and contractors into a private wiki. Travel details, processes, model release templates, everything in one place.

BookStack
BookStack is a simple, open-source, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.
https://www.bookstackapp.com

Nextcloud

What a pain the arse to setup! But now that it's working it powers our shared project files. Mainly between editor and assistant editor, I don't trust it to share files with clients (I use Frame.io and my Synology NAS) but as a central place for project files, coupled with rsync automated backups - it's brilliant!

Nextcloud - Open source content collaboration platform
The most popular open source content collaboration platform for tens of millions of users at thousands of organizations across the globe
https://nextcloud.com

Uptime Kuma

With all of these services, it's good to make sure they're up and alive. Uptime Kuma is excellent to ensure uptime. Coupled with notifications, I feel good that I'll catch anything that goes down. I've also run into having my portfolio down when a client was trying to access it, a nightmare. Uptime Kuma is that security that everything is working.

GitHub - louislam/uptime-kuma: A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool
A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool. Contribute to louislam/uptime-kuma development by creating an account on GitHub.
https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma?tab=readme-ov-file

Cal.com

I don't self host this but, what an incredible piece of scheduling software. I hate booking meetings, making invites, the whole deal.

Cal.com | Open Scheduling Infrastructure
A fully customizable scheduling software for individuals, businesses taking calls and developers building scheduling platforms where users meet users.
https://cal.com