How Spotify Made Me Self Host

Summary

Disclaimer: This post was written without the help of AI. Research for the self hosting setup (which docker images to use, Jellyfin vs. Plex) and the creation of initial configurations (docker-compose, wireguard) were supported by AI (among others like e.g. Reddit, Stackoverflow)How It All Started#If you don’t care about my motivations and are only interested in the technical setup just directly jump to Self Hosting Setup!Spotify Price Increase#In August 2025 Spotify announced a price increase in Germany. I received a friendly message that while I was a valued Premium subscriber, my subscription price would change (some might say increase):For the time being I decided to sit it out. So November 2025 arrived and my Premium membership ended.I decided to give Spotify’s free plan a try. How bad can it be? I had used the free tier 10 years ago and it was perfectly fine. How wrong I was!I don’t remember these restrictions being in place back in the day, but I may be wrong. It might be a case of enshittification of the free tier?Okay, fair enough: Companies need to make money, I’m not entitled to Spotify providing their services for free! For all those services I still pay for I certainly get an awesome user experience?Not so fast…Across All Streaming Services: Less Value For More Money#Across all streaming services I have noticed a decline in user friendliness, UX & UI.Price increases#All streaming services have seen price increases and / or introduced ads. I get it, companies need to make money. My day job consists of helping companies increase their revenues, it pays my bills!The issue: These price increases are accompanied by a worse UX/UI. From a user perspective my interest lies in getting the best value for money!Ads#Amazon Prime introduced ads to an already paid service. This is a noticeable worse user experience. Netflix introduced a paid plan with ads. At least for me YouTube advertises mostly mobile games & obvious scams (ever gotten one of these terrible l...