For the past few years, I’ve paid for Perplexity Pro and ChatGPT (and sometimes even Claude) at the same time. (And for those already typing furiously: yes, in Perplexity you can use those models from Anthrophic and OpenAI, but it’s not the same).

It was time to change that and only pay for what I actually use.

At work, we we’re already using OpenWebUI for quite some time and I really liked it. We have about 55 accounts right now and it handles it all great. To keep private things private, I do not use it for personal things. I also don’t think it’s fair having someone else pay for your private usage (and I don’t think it’s even legally allowed).

So during my Christmas holidays I thought: why not set it up for myself so I can use it personally.

Luckely, the setup was really really simple. I use Dokploy on an OVH VPS and Dokploy has a nice template:

It was really that simple. Just click the create button and it sets up the needed things.

The only thing that I changed we’re some env variables so other people cannot sign up for my personal instance and that the admin (me) cannot access other users their accounts by impersonating, so my girlfriend and family can use it if they want:

And finally I added volume backups to S3 so my chats are safe in case of a fully server disruption:

Now, the only things I had to do to mimic what I was used to from the other providers was:

• Adding OpenRouter as a provider.
• Whitelisting the models that I wanted to use.
• Adding OpenAI/Groq credentials for TTS and STT.
• Adding Tavily credentials for web search.
• Adding OpenRouter credentials for embedding (for file RAG).
• Adding OpenAI credentials for image generation.

And that’s it. It took me about an hour to set it all up and works awesome!