Why own it

Almost everything your family uses every day is free, but actually none of it is. The photo app, the messaging app, the video feed, the search box: nobody sends you a bill, because the bill is paid somewhere else. This page is about where that payment happens, and about what changes when you own a Home Cloud instead.

The free services were never free

A company that gives away a service to hundreds of millions of people has to make its money somewhere. It makes it by knowing things: what your family looks at, who they talk to, where they go, what they are about to want. That knowledge is sold to people who want to sell you something, and the better it gets, the more it is worth.

None of this requires anybody to be a villain. The company’s security is usually excellent. Their engineers are careful. The arrangement is simply that the service is the bait and your family’s life is the product, and it is a very good business for them.

Like with almost everything “big-tech” has done, it’s not the tech you should not trust, but the companies themselves.

James Mills, founder, writing on his own feed in May 2026.

Our founder spent part of his career as an engineer at Facebook, close enough to the machinery of the big platforms to watch it work. Self Hosted exists because of what he saw there.

What it actually costs you

Using cloud services and apps often costs no money, at least not at first. What it costs is a permanent, searchable record of your family’s private life, held by a company you will never meet, under terms that change when it suits them.

• Your children’s childhood becomes a dataset. Every photo, every message, every video they watch, from the age they first pick up a tablet.
• Your attention, and your children’s, is the thing being sold, so the products are built to hold it. That is not an accident of design, it is the design. Our founder has put it less politely: these products are made “highly addictive to the point where it rots your brain”.
• You cannot leave easily. Ten years of photos in someone else’s service is not a folder you can pick up and walk away with.
• The terms are theirs. Prices rise, free tiers shrink, features move behind subscriptions, and the data stays where it is.

It reaches further than you would expect. When Microsoft took over Minecraft, a game an enormous number of children play, it stopped being possible to play without handing over personal details, children’s included:

They basically ruined it for every privacy conscious family, parents and their kids, who can no longer play the game without giving away personal identifiable information (PII) on my children that Microsoft have zero rights to.

A Home Cloud does not fix that one, and nothing you can buy would. It fixes the part that is genuinely yours to control: everything your family stores, and everything your home network does.

There is a second cost, too. Every company holding a copy of your family’s life is another place it can leak from, and Australians have already learned that the hard way. Nobody in the Optus or Medibank databases chose to be there.

And eventually, money. Once the free storage fills up, the family starts renting space to hold its own memories, month after month, forever.

Where the Home Cloud started

In October 2025, a year before there was a product, our founder wrote this on his own feed:

I keep getting this email occasionally: “Your iCloud storage is almost full”. Now for various reasons, I don’t want my children to be using iCloud to store data, files, photos or any of the sort. They’re free to use iMessages, and other Apple services like the App Store, etc, but not storage.

What followed was an evening of making the block actually hold, because some apps will quietly route around whatever you set. That is the Home Cloud in one paragraph: somewhere else to put the family’s photos, and rules that keep working even when an app tries to get past them. He built it for his own household first. The Home Cloud is that same thing, made buyable by anyone.

What owning it changes

The Home Cloud does the same everyday jobs on two small appliances that sit on a shelf in your home. The photos, the files, the calendars, the children’s screen-time rules: all of it runs in the home, on hardware you bought outright.

• Nobody is watching, because there is nobody in the middle. Your photos back up from the family’s phones to the box on your shelf, and stop there.
• Nothing is being sold, because there is no advertising business attached to it. We sell an appliance. That is the whole arrangement.
• You can leave whenever you like, and take everything with you. Your files are your files, in ordinary formats, on a disk you own.
• It keeps working without us. If Self Hosted disappeared tomorrow, the appliance in your home would go on doing everything it does today.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Most connected products stop working the day your subscription ends, or the company behind them loses interest or goes out of business. This one does not, because nothing essential to it happens on our computers.

What we are not claiming

We would rather you bought this with your eyes open, so a few honest notes.

The Home Cloud is not a way to get something for nothing: it costs A$599. What you get for that is ownership, and an end to the arrangement above.

It will not make your family’s data invulnerable. It makes it yours: kept in your home, encrypted on the appliance, with the recovery key held by you and never by us. That is a different and much better problem to have than trusting somebody else’s promise.

And it does not replace the whole internet. Your children will still have phones, and the world will still be full of services that want their attention. What it does is take back the part that belongs at home.

Is this for you?

It is, if your family’s photos are spread across phones and laptops, the “storage full” messages have started, or a bedtime rule has already been got around. You don’t need to know anything technical: it arrives set up, with nothing to learn and nothing to maintain.

It isn’t, if you already run your own server and enjoy it. Keep doing that, and buy one for the family members who keep asking you for help.

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.