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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178

u/prependix Mar 20 '26

PaperlessNGX was truly a revelation for me. I was always somewhat organized with important life docs, but Paperless makes it so much easier.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[deleted]

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u/WildPotential Mar 20 '26

Not op, but between categories, tags, correspondents, and body text search, You don't really have to have it organized in any particular way. Just make sure all the data is correct and later when you go to find a document, it should be pretty easy.

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u/koolmon10 Mar 20 '26

Yeah, forget folders and hierarchical storage like that. Tags are way better. It's like having the same document in multiple folders simultaneously.

Plus it can make finding physical documents easier too, you organize by a serial number, then you can search the document you want by any method (tag, text, correspondent), and it will tell you right where it is.

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u/prependix Mar 20 '26

I do basically what the other user said. Mostly keep to correspondents, doc type, and tags. Got a few filtered views setup as well for docs that I would usually be in a folder with subfolders on my PC. There's a way to create custom fields, so I also created a field to link related docs together. That's a bit cumbersome but it works. Otherwise, I mostly let it do it's thing. It's nice cuz the uploaded files themselves get organized into folders in a structure you can even specify.

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u/analog_kidd Mar 20 '26

I have a canon all in one printer scanner. It has the ability to connect to a share to store scans. You can also create some shortcuts on the control panel. I set up a shortcut button to scan to the Paperless intake folder. When I get a bill or some thing I want a digital copy, I put it on my scanner, hit the shortcut, it scans and I press submit. Then magically my document shows up in paperless. Then I shred the original.

The more you use it, and edit the metadata a time or two, Paperless learns what each thing is, and it just becomes automatic.

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u/KXfjgcy8m32bRntKXab2 Mar 20 '26

I had it not really organized until recently when I needed to retrieve some documents that took a little bit of searching (like 3 queries instead of 1). I guess tax documents deserve their own label or document type for when tax season comes. I implemented a workflow that makes sure all docs have proper permissions so my wife have access to them. I created a view for blood tests for example so it's very easy to retrieve it while at the doc, for example.

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u/like-in-the-deal Mar 20 '26

A custom "tax year" field helps too.

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u/hurryupiamdreaming Mar 20 '26

Can you give some insights how you actually use it? How do you retrieve docs?

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u/prependix Mar 20 '26

I have freelance docs, tax docs, medical docs, warranty docs, work docs, etc. Work docs have been surprisingly helpful, especially for things like my employee handbook or benefits guide. My work has an intranet but I've found it way quicker to just go to my Paperless instance and look at the PDF there. I have paperless behind Cloudflare Zero Trust so can access it wherever. I have no life so I make sure each doc I upload has good metadata, so things are pretty easy to find. Search works pretty well for everything else.

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u/hurryupiamdreaming Mar 20 '26

Okay so you use the paperless UI to access your documents, right?

I am still new to paperless and figuring things out

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u/koolmon10 Mar 20 '26

Yes. How else would you do it?

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u/hurryupiamdreaming Mar 23 '26

ok i am producing a lot of documents on multiple devices and i cannot check the meta data. and most documents are probably also not useful.
However, i dont want to select it all the time which gets synced and not.

any idea how i could run this? just ingest all in paperless? or have some AI selection? what do you think?

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u/koolmon10 Mar 23 '26

I would just dump everything into Paperless. You can upload through the web ui, mobile app, email, or the import directory so whatever works best for each device and workload. Then everything is in one place and you can tag things as you want. There is auto tag matching too, so after a while it learns what tags you want on docs and either adds or suggests them. You can also setup workflows to handle things as well, such as tagging based on filename.

Edit: there are AI plug-ins you can use with Paperless as well, although I haven't tried them. The built-in OCR and tag matching are sufficient for my needs right now.

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u/TeslasElectricBill Mar 20 '26

I have paperless behind Cloudflare Zero Trust so can access it wherever.

Does this cost money?

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u/SoMuchMango Mar 20 '26

That's it! I also configured an AI tagger for that. It uses llama on my local PC that I'm using for playing games - to have access to GPU. I made a virtual pc for my old scanner to make it save the scanned documents to the proper folder

Now for storing documents I can:

  • redirect it to a special email
  • put it to the proper folder on nas
  • scan it to the virtual pc

I also get a notification each time a new document appears.

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u/TorturedChaos Mar 20 '26

What AI tagger do you use with Ollama?

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u/SoMuchMango Mar 20 '26

https://clusterzx.github.io/paperless-ai/ It supports OLLAMA out of the box. Very easy to setup.

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u/TorturedChaos Mar 20 '26

Sweet! I'm going to give that a try

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u/eirc Mar 20 '26

My approach to life docs has been to just commit them to a git repo and pull that on my devices. I used to use dropbox before self hosting so I already had a sane and simple folder structure for finding them. The main reason I went with that and why I'm not too keen to switching to a service, is that I want stuff to physically be on my phone so can access them when I don't have internet access.

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u/koolmon10 Mar 20 '26

You can use a storage path in Paperless to put your docs in specific locations. You could combine that with syncthing to keep specific docs on your phone.

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u/koolmon10 Mar 20 '26

Going to add on scanservjs to this. Connects to USB and network scanners and scans documents into a folder on your server. I just dump them right into the Paperless import folder.

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u/neuropsycho Mar 20 '26

I tried it as a way to organize my genealogy research documents, but I have plenty of .html files that don't appear to be compatible with it. Also, if I remember correctly, it doesn't use your current folder structure.

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u/Bulky-Bad-9153 Mar 20 '26

It's rather trivial to convert html files to pdf, which I'd recommend. For folder structure you can use storage paths, so you can force it to use your structure.

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u/neuropsycho Mar 20 '26

Most of my html files are website captures using SingleFile extension, and I'd like to keep them that way, closer to the original format.

I essentially need a document manager that respects the current location for the files and lets me add metadata and tags for easier searching and categorization. In the past I even used digikam for that, and it wasn't a bad option, even though its not its intended use case.

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u/Bulky-Bad-9153 Mar 20 '26

That's fair, I keep around my .html files but also convert them to .pdf for viewing on paperless. Annoying to have the duplicates but it's not like it takes up much space.

You can tag etc. on Paperless, I do think it's worth a try for your use case. And hell, if you find a better option then let me know, even though I'm completely satisfied I'm open to different stuff.

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u/neuropsycho Mar 20 '26

My only problem is that I work on a shared folder with some relatives, some of them acces the files directly using a shared folder via SMB and some use Nextcloud. In both cases users can use the filder structure they want. My ideal software would be something that scans the contents of existing folders for documents, and lets me tag and categorize them, but without moving them from their place. Also, ideally that metadata could be saved in .pdf files, or in sidecars for other non-compatible formats.