Frequently asked questions

HomeFree is a project with a singular goal: to let you control your own data by drastically reducing your dependence on big centralized corporate services. The way that's accomplished is to own your own device and host your own services. This has been technically possible for a long time but required a lot of experience and months or years of effort to get anywhere close to working reliably.

All the pieces are now available and commoditized, but there is no easy way to stitch them together. HomeFree solves this by being very specific about configuration, curating a set of applications, and adding a single UI with a consistent design language and one login that grants access to all of them.

There are similar systems out there but they are missing important pieces of the puzzle that make a self-hosted system simple and turnkey. The goal is to provide an Apple-like setup experience in a small box that you plug directly into your modem — replacing your router, NAS, home server, and Wi-Fi access point — and be up and running in minutes.

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

Almost everything Google offers is a target for inclusion. Already shipping or in flight:

• Photo hosting (Immich)
• Files, calendar, contacts (Nextcloud, Radicale)
• Collaborative docs (CryptPad)
• Audio/video streaming (Jellyfin)
• Chat (Matrix)
• Password management (Vaultwarden)
• Bookmark sync (Linkwarden)
• Personal wiki + notes (MediaWiki, Trilium, Joplin)
• Git hosting (Forgejo)
• Video surveillance (Frigate)
• Ad blocking (AdGuard)
• Mesh VPN (Headscale)

Yes — that's a core goal. You can mark services public (reachable on the internet at name.yourdomain) or private (reachable only from home or via the built-in mesh VPN).

Yes — open source and gratis. Copyright Ellis Rahhal, licensed under GPLv3.

Making the network layer easy is the project's hardest problem and biggest differentiator. Today HomeFree handles:

• Auto-detecting common ISP setups
• Free *.homefree.host subdomains for zero-effort setup
• Dynamic-DNS clients for personal domains (Hetzner, Cloudflare, more)
• Automatic Let's Encrypt certificates with DNS-01 wildcards

The web installer walks you through whichever path you choose.

Self-hosted email is genuinely fragile (deliverability, IP reputation, spam filters). HomeFree doesn't try to host outgoing mail today. You can progressively decide which services to self-host and which to keep elsewhere — Proton Mail and Fastmail are happy choices that pair well with HomeFree.

Encrypted restic backups are built in. They can target a local disk, a NAS, or any S3-compatible object store (Backblaze B2, AWS S3, Wasabi). The backup bundle is in a standard, portable format — move it to another HomeFree box or restore service-by-service.

Contributions of all kinds are welcome:

• Bug reports and feature requests on the git instance
• Documentation improvements
• Pull requests
• Help other users in chat