Piruetas – Self-Hosted Diary App

A lightweight, privacy-first diary/journaling app with rich text editing, image uploads, auto-save, and shareable links. Targets people who want a beautiful journal experience without trusting cloud services, available as easy Docker deployment.

Self-hosted personal software has real tailwind right now — post-2022 privacy fatigue, the Obsidian and Notion self-host communities, and general distrust of VC-backed apps shutting down have pushed a meaningful segment of technical users toward owning their own data. The closest substitute is Standard Notes, which already has a loyal self-hosted base and a freemium cloud tier, so differentiation has to come from UX polish or a sharply easier deployment story, not just privacy positioning. The $500–3k/mo ceiling makes sense for a solo dev doing one-time license sales or optional hosted tiers, but it's essentially a ceiling — journaling apps rarely convert to recurring revenue because users don't upgrade once the tool is working. The biggest risk is that the target user (technical enough to run Docker, privacy-conscious enough to self-host) is also technical enough to just use Obsidian with a local vault, which costs nothing and requires no maintenance from you.