The unglamorous self-hosted things that earn their keep, and how to decide what to drop

Everyone's list has the same five media services on it. These are the ones that quietly get used every week and rarely get mentioned.

• A recipe manager that imports from a URL. Strips the life story, keeps the ingredients. Used more than anything else in this house.
• A read-it-later archive that keeps the full text. The value is not convenience, it is that the article still exists in four years.
• A password-protected file drop for one-off transfers. Replaces the "just email it to yourself" move.
• A receipts and documents box with OCR. Boring, and the only one on this list that has ever saved real money.
• A local search index over your own documents. Finds things nothing else can, because it reads inside files.
• An RSS reader. Still the cheapest way to follow twenty things without any of them following you.

Deciding what to drop: for each service, ask what happens if it is gone tomorrow. Three answers. Nothing means turn it off now. Annoying means keep it and stop backing it up. A real problem means it needs a backup you have actually tested restoring.

Most stacks are two-thirds category one, and every service you turn off is one that cannot break at 2am.