I ditched Notion's $20 tier for a single Docker container that costs zero per month

Published Aug 29, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. I feel like Notion sits in a strange spot for many users right now. There are enough people who rely on it so that leaving it feels like a hassle, but the free tier keeps getting narrower every year. The 5MB per-file upload cap hasn't moved in ages and page history is still stuck at 7 days on Free. The pricing side is getting worse too. Notion killed the $10 AI add-on last year, so if you actually want meaningful AI usage, you're on Business at $20 a month, and that's billed annually. Meanwhile there's a category of self-hosted note apps doing the same job for the cost of running a container. SiYuan is one of those… One container and about five minutes And one of the most underrated open-source projects SiYuan is built by B3log, a Chinese open-source group, and there's a very active GitHub repo behind it. The community also runs a marketplace called Bazaar for themes and plugins, plus there are native apps across Android and iOS (HarmonyOS too if that's relevant to you). The philosophy is as expected but always appreciated: "no offline, no notes". So it's local-first by default, with an optional end-to-end encrypted sync as a paid extra if you want, and everything on disk is stored as .sy JSON files in a workspace folder you pick. What pulled me in was the block-first architecture because it is so similar to Notion. Every paragraph, list item, and heading gets a permanent ID, so references between them survive when you restructure things. Self-hosting it is just the one container. You pull the image from Docker Hub, point a folder on your PC at the workspace path inside the container, and expose port 6806. Then you set an access code and hit localhost in the browser. The first pull only takes a minute or two while it grabs the image. Also, your notes live in the folder you mapped, not inside the container itself, which is a small detail but helpful when you eventually rebuild it. Where the free tier of one tool covers the paid tier of another To do what I do in SiYuan for free, I'd currently be on Notion Business at $20 a seat a month ($24 if billed monthly) because that's the cheapest tier with the depth I'm getting with SiYuan. It has the block editing with the slash menu, databases and page embeds too, along with templates, and the transition is seamless if you're coming from Notion; it's a very similar feel. The AI is what actually changes the invoice math. SiYuan's AI features accept any OpenAI-compatible API endpoint, so I can point it at a local LLM running on my PC, or a cheap provider like DeepSeek, instead of paying for a bundled AI tier I might not even use daily. The project has actually started framing itself as a workspace where "humans and AI agents work together", which is where Notion has been trying to go, but this is just without the paywall. File uploads don't have the 5MB cap because there's nothing to enforce, it's simply your disk. And version history isn't 7 days either, it's whatever your data repo snapshots hold, and those you can configure yourself. Databases here are called attribute views and cover the tables-and-filters use case. It's not a 1-1 clone of Notion's database, and I actually think Notion's is still superior, but SiYuan's is capable enough. I do think the block-level references beat Notion's page-level linking for actual thinking work since I can cite a specific paragraph inside a long doc and the link survives being moved around. Flashcards with FSRS are built-in, so you don't need an extension for this function or to install anything separately. Web clipper and PDF annotation both replace stuff Notion doesn't really do natively. The Bazaar marketplace also covers a bunch of themes and widgets from the community, though it's not going to swamp you with options the way Notion's template gallery does. What SiYuan doesn't try to be, and it changed the way I work The habits Notion built that don't map cleanly here Notion trained me to think in shared workspaces where three people are editing the same doc at once. SiYuan is pretty honest about being a single-user tool at heart. You can share a self-hosted instance with a small group by handing out the access code, but there isn't a per-user permissions system, and real-time multiplayer editing isn't really the goal here. That was intentional by the devs, and it means the tool I was reaching for team stuff isn't the same one I use for my own knowledge base. Team docs live somewhere with proper collaboration primitives. Notion also trained me to expect a template gallery I could scroll like a browser. So sure, the Bazaar has themes and widgets, but it's not the huge template ecosystem Notion has, so I've had to rebuild a few workflows from scratch instead of forking someone else's page. The Docker pull that can replace an unnecessary subscription Notion still makes sense if three people are editing the same doc at once. But for how most of us actually use it, which is a personal knowledge base, SiYuan does the same job for free on a container you run yourself, and I think the math lands in its favor for that use case. SiYuan