Why we built this.
A home server has been possible for twenty years. It stayed rare because the setup was miserable.
Every few months someone decides they've had enough: of the price rise, of the terms-of-service email, of finding out their photos were used to train something. They read about self-hosting for an evening, discover it involves port forwarding, dynamic DNS, reverse proxies and certificates, and quietly give up.
That isn't a failure of will. It's a genuinely hard weekend of networking, and it has nothing to do with what they wanted, which was their photos on their own hard drive.
The hard part of self-hosting was never the server. It was everything between the server and the internet.
So we took that part
YoLab is a NixOS-based operating system that installs like Windows and looks after itself, plus the one piece that can't live in your house: a tunnel that gives your machine a real address, a certificate, and a way to answer your phone without exposing your home network.
Everything else stays yours. The apps run on your hardware and the files sit on your disks. If we vanished tomorrow the machine would keep working on your own network. You would lose the tunnel that reaches it from outside, not the server or anything on it.
What we charge for, and what we don't
We don't sell the operating system. Everything that runs in your house is free software under the AGPL and always will be. The platform that carries the tunnel, the DNS and the backups is ours and is not open source, and that is the part with a price on it.
We don't sell hardware either, because you almost certainly own something that works already. We charge for traffic through the tunnel and for off-site backup storage, metered by what you use and paid from credit you top up yourself.
It's a deliberately unexciting business model. We have no reason to want your data, no reason to lock you in, and no reason to keep you paying for a month you barely used.
Who it's for
People who know what a graphics card is but have never opened a terminal. Parents with fifteen years of photos and a nagging sense that they don't really control them. Anyone who'd rather their front-door camera didn't upload to a company in another country.
You don't have to be a sysadmin. That's the whole point.
Have it running by the weekend.
One spare PC and an afternoon is the whole commitment.
Not ready yet?
Leave your email and we'll write when something is worth knowing, at most once a month. Nothing else, and you can leave in one click.