The questions worth asking first.

No. The installer is a graphical wizard, and everything after it happens in a normal web page in your browser. Installing an app means filling in a short form and pressing a button.

There's an SSH key and a terminal waiting if you ever want them. Most people never open either.

Yes, as many as you like. Install YoLab on another spare PC with the same account token and it joins the machines you already have. Its disks join the same pool, and your apps can run on any of them.

One machine runs everything. From three machines on, the house keeps running when any one of them is switched off or breaks. That's the main difference from Umbrel, ZimaOS and TrueNAS, which each run on a single computer.

The machine keeps running. It's your hardware, your disks, and the operating system is AGPL licensed and public — nobody can switch it off remotely or make you stop using it.

What you'd lose is the tunnel that makes it reachable from outside your house, and the off-site backups we hold — those run on our infrastructure and that part is not open source. Your apps and data stay exactly where they are, on your own network, reachable from inside it as before.

No. Backups are encrypted before they leave your machine, and the tunnel is encrypted end to end — we carry the traffic without being able to read it.

What we can see is metadata we need for billing: roughly how much traffic passed through and how much storage you're using. Not what any of it was.

Usually, but not always — and it depends what you're replacing. Photos, files and media for a household typically come to a few euros a month against the twenty-odd that the equivalent subscriptions cost together.

What you're really buying is different, though: the subscriptions never stop, and this stops the day you decide it does.

Any 64-bit machine — an old desktop, a laptop with a broken screen, a mini PC, or a VPS. More memory helps if you run a lot of apps at once, and a bigger disk helps if you're storing years of video, but there's no minimum spec worth worrying about for a first install.

No, and that's rather the point. Your machine makes an outbound connection to the tunnel, so nothing on your home network is listening for the internet. It's the part of self-hosting that historically went wrong, and it's the part we took over.

If you're running one machine with one disk and no off-site backup, you lose what was on it — the same as any computer. That's why backup is priced the way it is: it's the cheapest part of the service, and the one worth turning on first.

With copies kept on more than one machine, a dead disk loses nothing. From three machines on, your apps also keep running while you replace it.

Yes — Bitcoin and Monero are both supported, alongside normal card payment. Every account starts with €5 of free credit, and you top up from €5 whenever you like.