Migrate your software to something you own
The internet is built upon open-source, while through time we as people have managed to lock ourselves into proprietary software. Proprietary software is like renting something, while we all like to own our stuff. You own your computer, so why not own your software as well on which you run your business. Nobody needs to force you to agree to the new terms of service, new privacy policy or increased pricing. If that happens, the only way out is to delete your account. Give up everything you've put into that software. And if that's a lot of energy, chances are high that you will accept anyway.
As an entrepreneur, you want to built on top of things that compound. You do not want to feel like a slave to accept anything just to move on.
Nowadays there's many open source alternatives to popular software. And it's getting much easier to self host those on your own server. From that moment on you decide to upgrade. Your monthly subscription cost reduces. You can host anything where you want it be. You have your data private.
360Creators has migration services to personally help you migrate from one old proprietary tools into new opensource selfhostable tools without knowing all the technical details.
I offer consulting & custom development on these tools:
Migration Services
All the stuff I felt frustrated about and found things that serve me better.
Self Hosted Photos
1 Billion users are giving away everyday their photos and videos to Google and or Apple. These things contain your locations, AI-scanned emotions, objects, creations, family members, friends, your partner. Google and Apple have all of this sensitive information about who you are. Every day you take a picture, record a video or take a screenshot it is being instantly uploaded and analyzed making them more powerful than they should be. On top of that they might even charge you money for it with some monthly subscription.
Migrating to Immich means that you can move all of your data-sources where you have photos and videos into one place that is yours in your home. It has the same capabilities to AI-scan your photos and videos, but on your own machine without the need for an internet connection. You can make your own backups by copying that single folder to another hard drive. And on top of that, it's free and open source. You can decide to pay for Immich if you really like it and that will give you nothing extra. Just because you feel they deserve it and you were able to cancel your Apple or Google subscriptions.
Self Hosted Notes
With 3DVista Notes everything runs in their cloud environment. The moment you stop paying, you loose all the notes. So you're locked in. And you need to worry about storage and small amounts of bandwidth.
With my Self Hosted Notes system you determine where you host the application. Create unlimited notes on your own privacy friendly server with as many 3dvista virtual tours as you like. Assign projects to the right clients. Assign notes to the right user. Discuss each note with each other. Automatically send email notifications. Full overview of all the notes per user account and as a system admin.
All on your own custom sub(domain) whitelabeled for you and your clients. No need to worry about storage or bandwidth as you can self host this Notes application.
Virtual Tour hosting
3DVista Hosting has been made easy. But once you know someone's url, you can change the last number and gain access to all other tours. The urls don't look pretty and in order to do so, you need to get into the complicated documentation. Paying for a few GB of bandwidth per day is simply ridicious.
AWS and Google Cloud have other issues. You give your credit card details and they can surprise bill you at any point making you pay 100.000 euros.
With a Hetzner VPS I pay less than 10 euros monthly for 80GB storage and 20.000GB bandwidth per month. Even 3DVista's highest place of 425 euros monthly only reaches 40GB storage and only 3.600GB bandwidth per month if you can manage to fully use the 120GB bandwidth each day. Hetzner being a more reliable provider that's open to reason if bad situations happen to keep their name clean.
Self hosted team chat
Somebody invites you to their Slack chat, and you need to pay Slack to gain access... Or pay to "View messages and files olden than 90 days".
Self hosted community
Being an online creator, you have to deal with social media to get your creations out there. However, you do not own Youtube, Facebook, X, Tiktok or Instagram. The owners can censor you at any point, throw in ads of competitors to your content, train their AI models to learn from your creations and more thing you don't want.
So it's nice to have a place where you can not be censored, have something white-labeled on your own custom sub(domain) and grow a community at scale.
Then there's platforms such as Circle who charge $100 monthly to run a community. Looks good, but that price forces you to keep charging your community members. Then there's Discourse being open-source, but it just feels so chaotic.
So I'm happy I found Fluent Community that runs on Wordpress which was a one time fee of $199 that gives me everything I need to run 360Creators Community. Unlimited posts, users, moderators, storage, courses and spaces.
Dynamic cms website with Webstudio
Using Webflow there's limitations in how many CMS items you may have and you need to pay per project per month. On top of that you need 3rd party sync tools that charge similar fees to sync data from other sources.
So it's nice if you can pay a single monthly subscription for as many projects on various custom subdomains as you want to have. On top of that you get instant syncing with any CMS of your own choice that has an API available. Plus there's no more headache using combo combo classes. Webstudio uses Design Tokens which make it much easier. And if you need to, you can self host the Webstudio builder on your own server.
Custom Made Marketplace
A marketplace to have community members selling their digital products sounds great, but charging 30% seller fees while making a mess with sales tax is not that great. Unclear filtering system, anyone that sells some heavily animated icon got accepted. Making it all look like quite a mess.
Adding in products of various sellers. Each seller having its own dashboard to modify their own products or add new products. Custom made, so everything can look as you want it to be. Each detailpage shows an embedded demo tour.
Connect any app with another
Connecting apps with each other is a great skill to have. Because sometimes a certain app doesn't have a particular feature that you would want to have. Such as sending out an email notification if something happens. Or syncing data with your own database.
Now there's tools such as Zapier and Make, but their pricing goes up quite quickly and are limited in their nature. Using n8n you step into an abundance of automations as it's being self hosted.
Self hosted cloud for file sharing
Dropbox pushes you to sign in to download when a file is shared with you. When the files are larger than 2GB, the partner you're sharing the files with is being pushed to pay as well. While the files are already stored on the paid plan...
And other companies having access to your project files, while you might be under NDA.
Self Hosted video calls
From Zoom and Google Meet to Jitsi.
Image editing
Creating thumbnails for tutorials doesn't require a pricy subscription from Adobe. A one time fee for Affinity Photo and you're set.
Solutions
Challenges that I have faced and solutions I have developed.
Programmatic SEO for 360Beckum
You can create nice virtual tours with 3DVista, but you can't get good results with it to be indexed by search engines.
This Virtual City of Beckum, located in Germany has over 100 panoramas that present different parts of the city.
What I have created is a database in a self hosted Baserow of all those 100 panoramas with titles, descriptions and camera angles. And I have created a dynamic page template that creates these 100 pages automatically using Webstudio. I have made sure that there is a dynamic sitemap so that search engines like Google can find all the dynamic content.
Now the client only needs to fill out a form to add a new panorama.
Self Hosted Elearning user tracking
Great there's e-learning in 3DVista, but how do you keep track who did what in the virtual tour?
With this e-learning user tracking system, you as the admin have a full overview of all students and courses how far each student got. You know exactly when each student finished which course. Fully self hosted on your own server.
Self Hosted Client Portal
A client portal that gives the client access to the work you've created per project, the timeline, invoices that need to be paid and so on.