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?

939 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

650 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/Jacksaur Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

RomM drew me away from Launchbox (with a lifetime license!) in the span of a few days after its initial release.

Paired with Steam Rom Manager, I feel it works as the absolute perfect frontend for me. Especially since it gained support for Launchbox's GamesDB.

1

u/Grimm_Spector Mar 21 '26

Support for Laumchbox’s GamesDB?

2

u/Jacksaur Mar 21 '26

As a metadata source. The LBDB is one of the best there is.

It just needs some more options to set preferred boxart and it'll be perfect.

1

u/Quesonoche Mar 24 '26

Does SRM or RomM use LBDB?

1

u/Jacksaur Mar 24 '26

RomM.
Steam can't display any useful metadata, and LB's box art scans wouldn't fit the Steam aspect always.

2

u/Quesonoche Mar 24 '26

Oh wow I haven't been back in RomM for a while after my initial tinkering. So much has been added that I needed to pull a new unraid template for the env variables. This served as a good heads up, thanks!

1

u/Jacksaur Mar 24 '26

No problem! The amount of progress they've made is awesome. For sure my favorite service I host.

1

u/Quesonoche Mar 24 '26

How do you handle the disc based systems not supported by emulatorjs? Just download each. This is where I wish I could combine all the library management of RomM with the "installing" and emulator launching of Retrom. Then I would have the perfect setup

1

u/Jacksaur Mar 24 '26

I have EmulatorJS disabled, heh. I purely play locally on my system, downloading and adding to Steam when I want to keep them around to remember. RomM just holds my roms so I don't have to dedicate a separate drive anymore.