Coolify shipped version 4.2.0 on July 21, 2026, and now sits at 59,800 GitHub stars. This open-source PaaS deploys your apps, databases, and 280 services to any Linux server with a single click — no per-GB billing, no bandwidth caps, no lock-in.
Dozzle weighs 4 MB, stores nothing, and streams Docker logs in real time from your browser. v10.6.13 shipped July 27, 2026 with an adaptive ANSI palette and an embedded SQL engine: if your only log tool is still the terminal, you’re bleeding time every single day.
Your users are in Tokyo, your server is in Paris — a CDN puts your pages 10 ms away from them. With Varnish or Apache Traffic Server on three $5 VPS instances, you get the same latency as BunnyCDN or Cloudflare, without a bandwidth bill that scales with your success.
Portainer 2.39.5 LTS shipped on July 13, 2026, and STS 2.43 brings native Kubernetes RBAC. The Business Edition is free for 3 nodes with no time limit, including RBAC, GitOps, and full audit logging. For any homelab up to three machines, it’s a no-brainer; beyond that, the cost pays for itself the moment you have a team.
IT-Tools packs over 80 developer utilities into a single stateless web page. It ships in a 29 MB Docker image and runs with zero configuration: if you’re still googling « base64 decode online » five times a week, you’re wasting time and leaking data.
Nginx Proxy Manager v2.14.0 turns reverse proxy configuration into three web forms and a Save button. Let’s Encrypt, redirects, and TCP/UDP streams come built in. If Traefik intimidates you and Caddy bores you, NPM is the answer.
Nextcloud Hub 10 launched on February 25, 2025 with 400 apps, a self-hosted AI Assistant, and 6× faster uploads. At €12 per user per month on Google Workspace, the open-source suite pays for itself from month one on a €6 VPS.
Actual Budget, the open-source fork of YNAB 4, shipped version 26.7.0 on July 2, 2026. This envelope-budgeting finance manager does everything YNAB does — budgets, OFX imports, multi-device sync — without the $14.99 monthly charge.
In 2026, Ollama and Open WebUI let you run a capable LLM at home without an engineering degree. A Mac Mini M4 with 24 GB of unified memory runs 32B models at Q4, and the break-even point against a ChatGPT Plus subscription lands between 18 and 36 months depending on the hardware you pick.
