I'm planning to build a highly customized personal "second-brain" app and want to use it both at home on my Mac and remotely from my iPhone. What hosting setup and technology stack would make the most sense for a project like this? I'd prefer a free option, but I'm comfortable spending up to about $10 per month. I'd also consider a slightly higher budget if the setup could host other personal projects too.
3 Answers
If you want a fully hosted and mostly free solution, Cloudflare Workers with Pages and D1 could work well, especially if you build the app as a progressive web app. That would let you use it from your iPhone without publishing a native app. The tradeoff is that you’ll be using Cloudflare’s APIs, so moving the project elsewhere later may take some work. Other possibilities include a hosted database such as Turso or Neon combined with a frontend deployment service.
Another option is a Cloudflare Tunnel. You can keep the app running locally on your Mac and securely route traffic to it through a domain, without opening inbound ports on your router. It’s convenient and inexpensive, but you should still add authentication and remember that the app won’t be available if the Mac is asleep or offline.
A practical stack would be React or another lightweight frontend, a small Node/Express backend, and SQLite to start with. Package everything in Docker so it’s easy to move later. If you eventually need the app available 24/7, you can move the same containers to an inexpensive VPS from providers such as Hetzner, OVH, Netcup, or RackNerd.
That sounds useful, especially if I want to keep the app running locally while still reaching it from outside my home network.