I’ve been building something over the last year, with probably 1000 hours going into it. A personal management app that does almost everything while being privacy-focused, no-bullshit, open-source and selfhostable. It’s called solyto.

I've been frustrated for a while with what's out there. I'm a data hoarder and love to organize things, but I kept jumping from app to app - started with Notion, but was frustrated with speed and then privacy issues. Switched to Obsidian, tried to do everything there, but figured Obsidian is great at notes, but wasn’t meant for writing custom JavaScript code to build libraries. Tried AnyType, found it confusing. Tried lots of other apps and was annoyed by pricy subscriptions, useless AI features and lots of “you should do this” things. There are great open-source options for most everything, but being a software developer at work, I really didn’t feel like stitching together 6 apps to do what I want and also, I found that’s not accessible to everybody.

I just wanted an app that does what I need in my daily life, that is easy-to-use and no-bullshit. So I built solyto. It’s completely free, open-source, self-hostable and community-focused. I’ve been using it with a couple of my friends for half a year and have replaced pretty much every other app I’ve been using. I’d love for this to be useful to others as well and to be some kind of community project - people suggest or wish for things, I (or other contributors) build it and that’s that. No company shit, no money incentives, no other motives.

Solyto is available at https://solyto.app.

It does todos, notes, calendars & contacts (with DAV sync to your phone), music library, book library, games library, news, daily trackers, finance tracking, time tracking, well basically almost everything I could think of. And if a thing you’d like is missing, I’d love to build it!

If any of you would like to try it out, you can do so via the website or via GitHub for selfhosting. We have pre-built images, compose files, etc. If anything is missing, let me know!

Anyway, I'd love feedback on this. Any kind of feedback! And of course any questions are also welcome.

Cheers, Leo

Links: - App: https://solyto.app - GitHub: https://github.com/solyto/solyto - Self-hosting instructions: https://github.com/solyto/selfhosted - Discord: https://discord.gg/JbNPJHG6

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goobatrooba 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Hi Leo, using a valid email and password I get a "There was an error with your registration" error.

Also I wonder... How sustainable is this? Free is great, but what is your income/maintenance model? E.g. you offer calendar which even many paid email providers don't offer.. :-)

Thanks for what looks at the surface like a very sleek tool.. i haven't been able to see it on substance.

	▲	Leomuck 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hey gooba! Thanks for wanting to try it out. And sorry, you ran into this issue. It appears Laravels throttling function doesn't work well with my reverse proxy setup. I have disabled it for now. I have just tried it out and registering works again. Again, sorry for this. This is my first publication attempt and I fear some issue will only show this way.. however, I'm here and happy to fix everything on the fly :)
	▲	Leomuck 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Oh, and I missed the middle part of your post. Fair question! I do think it is quite sustainable. For that to make sense you might have to know me better, but my perspective is I have a good paying job, I have money and especially time to spare and I want to make things better. So I'm honestly happy to spend money AND time on this to be sustainable. I have a very capable root server to run this on and I have money already reserved to get another one. I'm getting by just fine and I'm more than happy to spend some hundreds of euros a month to make the world a little easier/better for people. I'm also happy to spend my time for this. I did think a lot about monetizing it, but really I feel like that would skew the whole idea of the app. I want this to be for the community. We struggle enough with enshittification anywhere. I'm in a privileged position where I can build and maintain this. And it's available for self-hosting, so anybody can do so as well. Now, if we were to hit an insane amount of users, the question might have to be tackled again, but that's far away and I think with the infrastructure I have and can get with my allocated "solidary" budget, It'd really have to get to insane amounts to actually be an issue. So I'd like to think it is indeed sustainable. I'm doing this to be sustainable. I want to build something people appreciate and use. I'm happy to spend lots on it!