About Self Hosted

Self Hosted is a small Australian company building the Home Cloud: two appliances that keep a family’s photos, files, calendars and children’s screen-time rules in their own home, with nothing to learn and nothing to administer.

Why we exist

Most of a family’s photos, messages and records now live on computers owned by companies whose business is knowing things about people. Those services feel free because the bill is paid somewhere else: with a record of your family’s life, sold on to people who want to sell you something.

We believe people should own their own data, decide where it lives and choose who can see it. Self-hosting has always offered exactly that, and only ever to people willing to become system administrators: every guide starts with Docker, DNS, a reverse proxy and a free weekend. The Home Cloud takes what experienced people have been doing by hand for years and turns it into an appliance you can buy, plug in, and then not think about.

The argument is set out in full on why own it.

Who it’s for

The Home Cloud is built for households, not for people who already run their own servers. That choice decides everything about the product: if a family would have to open a terminal, read a configuration file, or make a decision only a system administrator could make, it does not ship until we have taken that away. It is the difference between software you could host yourself and an appliance you can simply own.

What we’re building

Home Cloud is the main effort: two small appliances that keep a family’s photos, files and children’s screen-time rules at home. The hardware is chosen and the first prototype is under test, and the product page tracks exactly where things stand.

Two smaller products are already live:

• InvoicePress — GST-compliant invoicing for Australian small businesses.
• Audiofern — turns PDFs into chaptered audio. Built first as an accessibility tool.

Both are offered as services today, and either could become a first-party app in the Home Cloud App Store.

The founder

Self Hosted was founded by James Mills, a software engineer from Brisbane who has run his own servers and services for more than twenty years: files, photos, email, chat and backups. Part of that career was spent as an engineer at Facebook, close enough to the machinery of the big platforms to see how much people’s data is worth and what is done with it. It left him with a conviction that has shaped everything he has built since: people should own their data, and control where it is stored and who has access to it.

That conviction produced Yarn.social, a decentralised social network that collects no personal information, tracks nobody and shows no ads, and Salty.im, an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol for people who want to run their own. Everything in the Home Cloud has been running in his family’s home for years, used daily, long before it was a product.

My mission in life is to build tools, products and services that give back the freedoms we have lost, and ensure our data privacy and security.

Company details

• Legal name: Self Hosted Pty Ltd
• ACN: 647 597 037
• ABN: 38 647 597 037
• Country: Australia