Last updated: June 2026
Memos is the lightweight, open-source notes app a lot of people land on after getting tired of flomo, Google Keep, or a paid Notion seat they barely use. It is a single Go binary with a clean timeline UI, Markdown support, tags, and an API. It runs on basically nothing and your notes stay in a SQLite file you own.
But "self-hosted" means you need somewhere to run it. And a notes app has one quiet requirement: it has to stay up, because the moment you trust it with your second brain, a server that sleeps or loses data is worse than useless.
I have run Memos on a handful of setups. Here is every option I found, ranked by actual monthly cost, with the trade-offs that matter for a notes app specifically.
TLDR: For a managed Memos you never have to babysit, InstaPods is my pick at $3/mo flat - one-click Memos with SSL, the SQLite database on the same server, and SSH access to a real server, at a price that does not move as your notes pile up. PikaPods is marginally cheaper (~$2/mo) but meters by resource and gives you no SSH. The cheapest self-managed route is a $4-5/mo Hetzner VPS with Docker if you want to run the server yourself. Memos itself is free and open source on every option.
