Similarly Cloudron.io and Sandstorm.io are very impressive and easy to use projects.

Sandstorm is great but apps really don't get updated anymore sadly. The founders also now have day jobs with CF, so probably don't get oodles of time to work on it.

Cloudron I've heard is excellent, completely dockerizes and automates everything with a slick webui, has lots of apps, however I just am unwilling to pay $15 a month for it.

Will likely roll my own apps/services with Rancher/haproxy/LE (or traefik as the reverse proxy/SSL term) on my sufficiently beefy Netcup rootserver KVM instance (at 8G should handle everything I want to do, but will likely use up most of it's resources which is fine).

The situation with that first thing you talk about, pretty sure it’s a direct result of the situation with that second thing you mention.

Yep funny to see such a A/B test situation play out and people want neither

I've been looking for a solution like this for years and was ready to pull out my CC when I saw the $15, assuming a "/y". But I have to say, "/m", wow. Between that and "free", it's not really A/B, more like A/Z with a lot of letters in between.

I've been using Cloudron.io for months now and have nothing but good things to say. Actively developed, good support, large selection of apps.

Cloudron has a free plan (two apps tho)

Given that truly decentralized mass-market application/data hosting is not on the immediate horizon, the Sandstorm model is IMO really the best answer to how the average person can control their data. It brings the security and permissions model of mobile apps to the server side and makes it about a safe/hassle free to host web apps as it is to obtain and install mobile apps.

In return it places some restrictions on how developers build apps, which unfortunately means that it can't take advantage of all of the existing open source apps out there without extra work. But hopefully as people start to prioritize having control over their data, the app ecosystem will pick up steam.

Has anyone used Kubeapps? It looks open source, wonder how it compares with Sandstorm and Cloudron?

Using mailcow for hosting your own mail server is a awesome and smooth experience