This is something I'll be working on soon enough. There are many, many dependencies (not only for the web app, but there are three DBs that you have to have installed as prerequisites - mongo, postgres/mysql, and redis).

The real problem with setting up your own instance of NewsBlur is that you'll have to do your own feed fetching. This is effectively what you're paying for when you pay for NewsBlur. Let me break it down.

500 feeds updated once every five minutes is 144,000 feed fetches a day. Couple that with the original page and icon fetches, you're looking at almost two feeds every second just to keep your feeds up to date. And the average feed takes 5 seconds to completely update (feed, page, differences in stories, updating unread counts). So you have to run 10 processes in parallel, and that's already beyond the capabilities of most single machines. Then good luck keeping your DBs running clean and backed up.

Or you could pay $2 / month and never have to worry about setting up a very big stack. And you get the social community of shared stories on newsblur.com.