Michael Soto

I'm a senior content strategist & technical writer working for Elest.io. I turn complex self-hosted solutions into clear, actionable guides. 7 years crafting developer content. Coffee-fueled, deadline-ready, obsessed with finding the right words.

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 13 New Releases This Week (July 26 - August 1, 2026)

It was a busy week across the Elestio catalog, with releases landing everywhere from databases to document management. This roundup covers the notable open-source updates from July 26 to August 1, 2026, so you can see what changed in the tools you actually run. No critical CVEs hit catalog

CRM

Self-Host Twenty: The Open-Source CRM You Actually Own

The moment that makes you hate your CRM is always the same. You add one more person to the team, the per-seat bill jumps again, and you realize you are paying a monthly rent that only ever goes up, for software that holds the single most valuable asset your

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 31, 2026. n8n AI Builder, Immich 3, Paperless-ngx 3.0.4

This was a patch-and-polish week across the self-hosted catalog. No dramatic launches, but two projects we care about shipped real upgrades, and a whole stack of tools you probably run pushed point releases worth taking. Here are the eight updates from the Elestio catalog that mattered this

AI

Self-Host Presidio: Redact PII Before It Ever Reaches Your LLM

I did the thing you're not supposed to do. A customer emailed us a support transcript, I wanted a quick summary, so I pasted the whole thing into a hosted LLM. Halfway through typing the prompt I noticed it: full name, email, a phone number, and the last

Databases

DBGate: One Database GUI for Your Whole Team

Every team has this setup, and every team pretends it is fine. One developer is on TablePlus, another swears by DataGrip, a third is SSHing into the box and running raw psql, and the new hire spent their first morning figuring out which VPN, which host, and which password gets

DevOps

Self-Host Healthchecks: Know the Instant a Cron Job Dies

Here is a fun way to lose a weekend. Your nightly database backup cron job has been failing silently for three weeks. The command errored out, cron swallowed the message, and nobody noticed, because a job that does not run does not send you anything. Then a disk dies, you

AI

Self-Host Langfuse to Trace Your AI Agents

Your agent worked fine in the demo. Then it hit production, and one afternoon a user asked it something ordinary and it burned through 40 tool calls, spent way too many tokens, and returned a confidently wrong answer. You open your logs and find a single line: "agent finished.

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 23 New Releases This Week (July 19-25, 2026)

Another busy week across the catalog, and this one leans heavily on security and one genuinely big rewrite. Paperless-ngx shipped a major version, Vaultwarden patched a stack of vulnerabilities, and the usual suspects in databases and observability kept the version numbers climbing. Here is everything worth knowing from July

Affine

AFFiNE 0.27: New Importers, Calendar View, and a Sync Warning

If you have ever tried to move years of notes out of Notion or Obsidian, you know the feeling. Your knowledge is right there, but it is locked inside someone else's app, and getting it out cleanly feels like defusing a bomb. AFFiNE has always pitched itself as

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 30, 2026. ServiceNow RCE, GitHub's $100M, Logseq 2.0

Another week, another reminder that self-hosting is equal parts freedom and responsibility. This week brought a nasty pre-auth exploit making the rounds, a community funding milestone with an asterisk, and a beloved note-taking app deciding to split itself in two. Grab a coffee. Here are the eight

Self-Hosted

Self-Host Centrifugo: Real-Time Updates Without Pusher

A few years ago I lost the better part of a month to a "simple" live notifications feature. Just a little bell icon that lights up when something happens. How hard could it be? I wrote a WebSocket server, then spent the next two weeks fighting reconnections, dropped

Self-Host FerretDB: MongoDB's API on PostgreSQL

A while back I watched a team ship a perfectly good prototype on MongoDB, then stall for a week when legal asked one question: what license is the database under? The answer, since 2018, is the SSPL, which is not an OSI-approved open-source license. For a product that

Self-Host GrowthBook: Feature Flags for AI Rollouts

The first time we shipped an AI summary feature, it went sideways at the worst possible hour. A model update started returning confidently wrong summaries for a chunk of users, and the only way to turn it off was a code change, a CI run, and a deploy. That is

Quickwit + S3: Sub-Second Log Search Without Elasticsearch

I got a cloud bill once where the log storage line was bigger than the compute line. Not the app servers, not the database. The logs. We were paying premium block-storage prices to keep three replicas of data nobody looked at until something broke. If you have ever run

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 26 New Releases This Week (July 12-18, 2026)

Another busy week across the Elestio catalog. Twenty-six stable releases landed between July 12 and 18, with a heavy run of identity and database updates, a fresh Ghost, and a major Paperless-ngx beta on the horizon. Here's everything worth updating for, grouped by category. Security note

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 29, 2026. SharePoint Zero-Day, Nextcloud Migration, KVM Escape

Some weeks the theme picks itself. This week it was trust: who you hand your infrastructure to, and what happens when that trust turns out to be misplaced. Microsoft shipped a SharePoint zero-day that was already being exploited, a German state walked away from SharePoint entirely in the same

AI

OpenHands: A Sandbox for Your Coding Agent, Not Your Laptop

Here's a question I kept dodging until it bit me: when your coding agent runs rm -rf, whose machine is it running on? For most of last year, the honest answer for me was "my laptop." I'd point Claude Code or the OpenHands agent

DevOps

Self-Host NATS: Lightweight Messaging for Your Apps and AI Agents

Every distributed system I've ever built started the same way: two services talking over HTTP. Then it's five services, each one hardcoding the others' URLs, and one restarts during a deploy while three callers time out. Suddenly you're bolting retry loops and circuit

DevOps

Self-Host Infisical: A Secrets Manager for Your Apps and Agents

Here's a confession: for years my idea of "secrets management" was a .env file that lived in three places, drifted out of sync in all of them, and occasionally got pasted into a Slack thread so a teammate could unblock themselves. Then someone rotates a database

DevOps

Self-Host Gotenberg: A PDF Rendering API for Your Apps and Agents

Sooner or later every app needs to spit out a PDF. An invoice, a monthly report, a signed contract, a receipt an AI agent just generated. And every time, you reach for the same cursed toolbox: bundle a headless Chrome into your container, or wrestle wkhtmltopdf, or npm-install Puppeteer

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 12 New Releases This Week (July 5-11, 2026)

Another busy week across the catalog. Twelve services in the Elestio catalog shipped new versions between July 5 and July 11, and this batch leans heavily toward security hardening and observability. Keycloak added a preview SCIM API, SigNoz pushed a big dashboard overhaul, and Immich kept its rapid v3 cadence

Self-Hosted

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 28, 2026. Ollama's $65M, Chatto Goes Open Source, Camel CVEs

Another week, another pile of releases, funding rounds, and CVEs to sort through. This week the money kept flowing into open-source AI, a genuinely nice self-hosted chat app dropped its source, and Apache Camel handed everyone a reason to patch on a Monday. Here are the eight stories

AI

Give Your AI Agent Private Web Search: Self-Host SearXNG

Here's a problem nobody warns you about until you hit it: the moment your AI agent needs to look something up on the web, you're suddenly on the hook for a search API. Google's Custom Search caps you at 100 free queries a day

AI

What Actually Happens When an AI Agent Calls an MCP Tool

Your agent "used a tool." You watched it check the weather, query a database, or open a file, and it felt like magic. It isn't. Underneath that one line in the transcript is a small, boring, completely knowable exchange of JSON messages. Once you've

Self-Hosting

You Spend More Time Managing Self-Hosted Tools Than Using Them?

You know the drill. You spin up n8n to automate a few workflows, Grafana to keep an eye on things, maybe Supabase for a side project's backend. It feels great for about a week. Then a CVE lands, a backup you assumed was running turns out not to