What’s the best low-cost way to host a personal app for access anywhere?

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.

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.

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.

For personal use, the simplest option is to run the app in Docker on your Mac and connect to it remotely with Tailscale. Tailscale creates a private network between your devices, so you don’t have to expose the app publicly or configure port forwarding. The main limitation is that your Mac needs to be powered on and connected whenever you want to use the app.