r/selfhosted
People running their own infrastructure by choice
- Size
- Large
- Buying intent
- High
- Promotion
- Open
One of the few technical communities where showing your project is a normal and welcome thing to do, particularly if it is open source. Members actively want to discover new software and will try things on a weekend for the pleasure of it.
The obvious catch is willingness to pay. The community exists partly to avoid paying for hosted services, so commercial conversion is lower than the engagement would suggest. It is an excellent place to find early users and a poor place to find early revenue.
What people actually post
The alternative hunt
Looking for a self-hosted replacement for a commercial service. Explicit intent with a stated constraint, usually cost or data control.
The setup showcase
Members sharing their stack. Good for discovering what your product would sit alongside.
The project launch
Permitted and common. One of the few places a Show-and-Tell post is genuinely welcome.
What people get wrong about it
Engagement is read as demand. Members will enthusiastically deploy your project and never pay for it, and that is a legitimate outcome to plan around.
Can you promote in r/selfhosted?
Open by the standards of technical communities, with the expectation that you are a builder participating rather than a company marketing. A repository link earns far more goodwill than a landing page link.
What gets you removed
A landing page with pricing and no self-hosting instructions. The community reads it as the exact thing they are here to avoid.
A good first contribution
Share something you built and self-host yourself, with the repository link first. This is one of the few technical communities where that is the expected opening.
Products that fit here
- Open source with a hosted option
- Tools with a Docker deployment path
- Privacy and data ownership positioning
- Anything replacing a subscription service
What does not work
Cloud-only products with no self-hosting path. The community's entire premise is the opposite of that.
Timing
Steady, with a lift around long weekends and holidays.
How it compares to the neighbours
The communities closest to r/selfhosted, and how they differ on the three things that decide whether one is worth your time.
| Community | Size | Intent | Promotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/selfhosted | Large | High | Open |
| r/devops | Large | High | Conditional |
| r/sysadmin | Very large | High | Conditional |
| r/kubernetes | Mid-size | High | Conditional |
Where this fits in a wider plan
r/selfhosted appears in our list of the best subreddits for developer tools, which sets it against the other communities worth watching in that market. If you are starting from nothing, the six-week plan in finding your first 100 users covers how to build standing before you mention a product at all.
Watch r/selfhosted without reading it.
Lidar reads it every day, scores each post against what your product does, and sends you the ones worth answering. Along with the rest of engineering and infrastructure.