Frequently Asked Questions

HomeFree is a project with a singular goal: to allow you to control your own data by drastically reducing your dependence on big centralized corporate services. The way this is accomplished to to own your own device and host your own services. This has been possible for a long time but required a lot of experience and months or years of effort to get anywhere close to making this work in a reliable and usable way.

In the process of building a self-hosted setup at home, the realiztion dawned that all the pieces are now available and commoditized, but there is no easy way to stitch them together and no easy way to configure them. HomeFree aims to solve this by being very specific about choosing the right configuration and curating a set of applications to cut through the endless choice and inconsistency of currently available systems, and adding a single UI with a standard design language and single login to access them all.

There are similar systems out there but they are all missing important pieces of the puzzles to make a self-hosted system simple and turnkey. A goal is to be able to provide a elegant Apple-like design experience in a small box with built-in battery backup and redundant storage that you plug directly into your modem and replaces your router, NAS, home server, and WiFi access point, all through a short installation process to be up and running in minutes.

For a detailed comparison with other products, check out the product comparison page.

Almost everything that is provided by Google and other large tech companies could be a target for inclusion in HomeFree. Services that are already included or are in work:

• Photo hosting
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Office Suite
• File Storage
• Video and Audio Serving
• Home Automation
• Video surveilance
• Website/Blog
• Ad Blocking
• Password Managemenet
• Browser Bookmark Sync

Yes! That's one of the core goals of HomeFree - to provide public facing services and access so that you don't have to rely on large centralized services. You can configure various services to be private to your home or open to the internet. For services that are private, you can access them remotely by connecting to HomeFree through a built-in VPN.

Anything that could run on a computer or be run as a service could be hosted by HomeFree. The goal is to make adding modules standard and plug-and-play. AI, privacy, and decentralization are themes that could be explored.

• External GPU plugin for AI services. Could cluster GPUs with friends, family, or even strangers
• Decentralized social media nodes such as Bluesky and Mastadon
• Decentralized CDNs for high traffic sites and services
• Shared back-up services between friends and family
• Cryptocurrency (though nothing about HomeFree is currently related to or dependency on a blockchain)
• Pluggable DNA sequencing module for those who don't want to use a public DNA sequencing service

Yes, it is free in both major senses of the word - it is open source, so you can install and modify it as you please. It is also free to use, without payment.

Making these easy are core goals of the project, and the vision is to make them as automatic as possible. The easiest route would be a web-gui or phone app based configuration that does the following:

• Detect the ISP and automatically configure appropriately
• Provide simple insructions on any changes required to the modem configuration, if necessary
• Longer term, look at spearheading a movement for zero-config ISP/modem setup for self hosting
• Provide a dynamic DNS service with subdomains at homefree.host for zero-effort setup
• If a personal domain is desired, provide a simple step-by-tep UI-based config
• For personal domains, detect the registrar, and offer custom instructions for setting up dynamic dns
• Longer term, look at protocols/APIs for automatically configuring registrars

It's well know among the self-hosting community that email can be fragile and difficult to self-host for various reasons. The great thing about HomeFree is that it's not all or nothing. You can progressively decide which services you want to host and which you want to continue to use elsewhere. But there are still plans to offer the ability to host an email server if you so wish. For an example of a simple US for setting up a custom domain for secure and reliable email, look at Proton Mail's domain configuration UI.

The system is designed to store all data in a way that is easy to bundle and back-up to another machine in your location and off-site as well.

The backup data bundle is in a standard format and can easily be moved to another HomeFree server or an online HomeFree-compatible service if you do not want to continue hosting yourself.

This problem is still under consideration. One potential solution is to share load across multiple HomeFree servers, either through friends and family, or a more open anonymous distributed CDN of some sort. Also, paid-for services could be offered that provide a back-up in case your server goes down or is otherwise out of service.

We welcome contributions of all kinds! You can:

• Submit bug reports and feature requests on our git instance
• Improve documentation
• Submit pull requests
• Help others in our community forums

Check our contribution guidelines [TBD] to get started.

HomeFree is currently built and copyrighted by Ellis Rahhal, and licensed under GPLv3.