The appeal of having WordPress take over more responsibilities than public websites is to reduce dependency on other (web) services that each have their own agenda.

Each service starts off with a vision and the desire to fill a need. But then often economics need to be dealt with and thus services get caught up between charging their users (or showing ads) to cover the costs and the temptation to grow, thus taking more and more money from them to make it a business.

I’m not here to argue about the good or bad aspects of economics. There is a lot of good in actually employing more people through a project. But coming from a sustainability angle, maybe you don’t need all aspects of each subscription but have no choice in accepting the whole bundle with its price, or giving up on the service.

By having your own WordPress available as a place to run the services you really use, you can free yourself of that. I try to make the ones I created great by default, but because they are open source, you can add, remove, or change what does not fit. With AI, this promise becomes more feasible today.

Not every service can be usefully converted into a self-hostable WordPress app:

There might be a dependency on external APIs that are not available to individuals or at prices that are only sustainable across a huge user base.

Or a network effect within the app itself, although I hope that ActivityPub can grow beyond the current use cases and make it possible to achieve those effects across (self-hosted) services.

That still leaves many opportunities: I am building this trove of WordPress apps that can serve as practical alternatives to online services.

In the vein of the alternativeto.net website that I really like as a way to empower people to find something that suits them (better), I have created this table (that you can also find inside My WordPress):

There are more apps that don’t really fit in the above categories such as Chat-to-Blog or Apiary Press from my colleague Francesco Bigiarini. Also you can integrate one-pager apps using my little convert-to-wp-app tool.

This list is ambitious, and having their own WordPress for having those apps yourself isn’t for everyone. Even if you have a WordPress already, you might feel that one would not be the best place to try.

But with my.wordpress.net, you have a space where you can play with the apps above. See what they can do today, post an issue on Github if you have a good idea for what to add, get it hosted eventually. Which, by the way, is a good reason for using WordPress: hosting is affordable and widely available.

Each service starts off with a vision and the desire to fill a need. Likely the successful services have grown so many features that you can’t (yet) have them all inside WordPress. But it can be a journey towards your personal app that you can start now.