What to replace, what to keep, and where the self-hosted alternatives still fall short. Practical decisions, not ideology.
I still use Gmail. I still have a Google account. This page isn't about purity. It's about choosing which fights matter for your family.
I draw the line at family photos. Fifteen years of my kids growing up, stored on Google's servers, feeding models I never signed up for. Google knowing what time I check my calendar is fine. The photos are different.
The self-hosted alternatives have gotten good. Not perfect. I'll tell you where they fall short. But good enough that the trade-off makes sense.
Each service runs on a Mac at home. Scroll down for the honest review of each one.
Automatic photo backup, face recognition, shared albums, map view. The mobile app your family will actually use.
Morning briefings, task coordination, notifications from every service. Also your family's private chat.
Open-source language models running on your Mac. Private, unlimited, no subscription per person.
Scan, OCR, auto-tag, search. Your family's paper archive, digitized and queryable.
Network-wide ad and tracker blocking. Every device, no app to install.
File sharing and collaborative documents. The missing piece for families leaving Google Workspace.
Each of these services is useful on its own. FamilyKit connects them with local AI. Paperless gets better document recognition. Your morning briefing in Element pulls context from the calendar, the document archive, and the family chat. The combination creates something none of these services offer individually.
Immich is the reason this guide exists. Two years ago, self-hosting photos meant ugly interfaces and manual uploads. Immich changed that. It looks and feels like Google Photos: automatic backup from your phone, face recognition, map view, shared albums. The mobile app is solid.
In FamilyKit, Element is more than a chat app. It's where the kit talks to you. Morning briefings show up here. Notifications from Paperless when a document is filed. Alerts when backups complete or something needs attention. It's the family's operations center, running on your own Matrix server.
It's also your family's private chat for the inner circle. Your partner, your kids, maybe close family. End-to-end encrypted, nobody mining the metadata. We use it for grocery lists and school coordination.
FamilyKit runs open-source language models on your Mac (currently Ollama, with LM Studio as an alternative). Open WebUI puts a ChatGPT-style interface on top for the family: homework help, recipe ideas, "explain this to me like I'm five." It all stays on your machine.
But the local AI does more than answer questions. It improves the other services. Paperless gets better text recognition and document classification. Your morning briefing in Element gets written by a model that understands context. Document search gets smarter. The individual services are fine on their own. Local AI is what makes the combination feel like a product.
Paperless-ngx replaces the drawer full of paper, and Google Drive's role as a document dumping ground. Scan a document or forward the email, and Paperless OCRs it, reads the content, auto-tags it, files it. School letters, insurance policies, receipts, contracts. Searchable and organized without you touching a folder.
Pair it with the local AI and you can ask "when does our car insurance expire?" and get an actual answer from the documents already on file.
Paperless doesn't do collaborative documents. If your family needs shared spreadsheets or real-time editing, Nextcloud fills that gap. Different tools for different jobs.
This one has no caveats. AdGuard Home blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level, across every device on your network. Phones, tablets, smart TVs, apps that browser extensions can't reach. Set it up once, point your router's DNS to it.
The kids' tablets stop showing YouTube ads. The smart TV stops phoning home to tracking servers. No app to install, no per-device configuration.
A few apps will break if they depend on ad infrastructure for functionality. You'll whitelist a domain or two in the first week. After that, it runs on its own.
You might already have a Mac at home. Any Apple Silicon Mac with at least 32GB of memory can run the full kit. 64GB is recommended if you want local AI to be useful beyond simple questions. A Mac Mini, a Mac Studio, even a MacBook you're not carrying around anymore.
Running it around the clock adds about €3 a month to your electricity bill. That's it for ongoing costs. Everything in the kit is open source.
This is not a cost-saving exercise. If you add up your cloud subscriptions, self-hosting might come out cheaper on paper, but that's not the point. The point is learning how your family's infrastructure works, the independence of running it yourself, and the quality of life that comes from automating the stuff that used to be annoying. It's a hobby that's useful.
The other cost is time. Setting up eight services from scratch, configuring them to talk to each other, getting local AI to play nice with Paperless and Element, figuring out backups. That's weeks of evenings. FamilyKit exists to skip that part. The Docker configuration is done. The services are wired together. The AI integration works out of the box. You handle your domain and your passwords, and the kit handles the rest.
Not a theoretical weekend. A real one where you also make breakfast and take the kids to the park.
Fork the repo. Edit your domain and passwords. Run the setup script. Each step tells you what it's about to do before doing it.
One command starts everything. Install the Immich and Element apps on your phone. Start the photo upload.
Get your partner on Element. Show them the photo app. Point your DNS to AdGuard. The ads disappear from every device at once.
Photos backing up, messages encrypted, AI running locally, ads blocked across every device. Backups run at 3 AM.
Doing it from scratch? Weeks. Picking the right services, configuring Docker, wiring everything together, troubleshooting networking, getting AI to talk to Paperless. It's a proper hobby project. Rewarding, but time-consuming.
With FamilyKit, the technical setup takes a weekend. The services are pre-configured and tested. You bring your domain and passwords. The actual transition (migrating photos, getting family on new apps, building the habit) still takes a few weeks regardless. Start with photos and ad blocking. Add the rest when you're ready.
Depends on what bothers you. Family photos in AI training datasets bother me. Subscription creep bothers me. Even without those, it's a satisfying project and you learn a lot about how infrastructure works. If none of that resonates, Google's products are good. No judgment.
You need to be comfortable with a terminal. If you can clone a git repo and edit a config file, you can run FamilyKit. The Docker configuration, service wiring, and AI integration are done for you. That's the part that normally takes weeks of evenings to figure out.
For backup, browsing, and sharing, yes. The mobile app is excellent and the web interface is polished. You'll miss the auto-generated memories and some of Google's search magic. The core photo library experience is solid.
Any Apple Silicon Mac with at least 32GB of memory. 64GB recommended for local AI. A used Mac Mini M1 (around €400) works. We run ours on a Mac Studio M1 Max with 64GB, but that's overkill for most households.
Gmail. Self-hosted email is painful and unreliable. Keep it. The services worth replacing are the ones storing your family's private data: photos, documents, messages, and the AI you talk to about personal things.
You can do it yourself. Every service in the kit is open source and free. FamilyKit's value is the configuration: services that are wired together, AI that improves document recognition and powers morning briefings, backup scripts that work, and a setup that's been tested with a real family. It saves you the weeks of troubleshooting and stitching things together.
Practical guides for self-hosting. No lectures. Just what works.