A decade of “personal cloud box” attempts has shown that the hard part isn’t the hardware, it’s the long-term social contract. Synology/WD/My Cloud/etc all eventually hit the same wall: once the company pivots or dies, you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control, holding the most irreplaceable thing you own: your data. If you’re going to charge an Apple-like premium on commodity mini-PC hardware, you really have to over-communicate what happens if Umbrel-the-company disappears or changes direction: how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?

The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with. That’s mostly about boring stuff: automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies, and clear guarantees about what runs locally vs phoning home. If Umbrel leans into being forkable and portable across generic hardware, it has a shot at being trusted infrastructure instead of just another pretty NAS that people regret once the marketing site goes dark.

Don't forget the user experience needs to be seamless. We bubble ourselves to this as tech fluent folks on HN, but the seamless quality needs to be on par or better with Google Drive, iCloud drive, Google / iCloud Photos etc.

Ability to share, good default security, and seamless integration with the things people care about.

If this device can't automatically backup a phone wirelessly and without my interaction, it will be a poor proposition to most people.

We would all have been better off fiercely advocating for open protocols for all this stuff first (forced interop), but technologists have not wanted to wade into that in a sustained, en masse way

Hi Umbrel CTO and cofounder here, appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

> how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?

The code is publicly available with a non-commercial restriction. If Umbrel the company disappears it's possible for a community maintained fork to live on. Someone else in this discussion mentioned that the NC clause hurts maintainability due to no future company being able to profit from taking over maintenance. They suggested we add a clause revoking the NC restriction if Umbrel goes out of business. It's a good suggestion and something we'll definitely consider, I think it should be possible.

Regarding apps specifically, we have the concept of "community app stores". Anyone can host their own app store which is just a public git repo that any other user can use by pasting it's url into their web ui once. Community app stores completely bypass our main app store, they don't rely on our infrastructure and will continue working if we disappear. There are already hundreds of community app stores in use:

- https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-community-app-store/fork... - https://github.com/search?q=in%3Areadme+sort%3Aupdated+-user...

> automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies

We recently shipped backups baked directly into umbrelOS. You can backup to a local NAS, USB device, or another Umbrel (local or remote). You can restore individual files from hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots, or restore the entire state of your Umbrel onto a fresh device from your backups.

https://x.com/umbrel/status/1970508327479320862

> portable across generic hardware

We currently support running on Raspberry Pi, all amd64 devices, virtual machines and there is unofficial support for running in Docker.

> The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with.

I completely agree, that's the plan.

Sorry, isn't this running an open-source OS? The header has a link to a github with a non-commercial license[0].

If so, couldn't you just use the OS on non-premium-priced mini-PC hardware and never have to worry about them locking you out of your box? I guess maybe it's concerning if you're being forced to update by the OS? I've never actually run a system like that, but was considering umbrel OS (didn't actually know about the hardware until this post), so if I'm being naive about something, it's in earnest.

[0] https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel

> you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control

Totally agreed. I had seen umbrel and others in the past but recently decided to just get a 4-bay m.2 ssd enclosure (using RAID 1 for 2 sets of 2), not a NAS (after previously having a Synology NAS). I only want pure file access in a small, quiet form factor and I can have another Mac host and cloud backup. Currently using Tailscale Drive (alpha feature) to share it with devices and working pretty well so far.

https://x.com/Stammy/status/2000355524429402472

I think the problem is IPS-provided routers being locked down. Alternatively, IPv6 availability and support. Alternatively, static residential IPv4 availability. Alternatively, dynamic dns services which always require a subscription to use your own domains.

That's exactly my goal with HomeFree:

https://homefree.host

Goal is my mom running it, and keeping it 100% open source.

It looks like there isn't a lot of visible progress, but there's now a branch with a live CD installer, and an admin UI, so no command line shenanigans are necessary. Once that is cleaned up, the website will be refreshed.

I really need to quit my job so I can work on this full time.

this can be solved by adding an external nas - for redundancy - and an opensource application or extension that manages the syncing?

making self hosting more seamless is key, we simply can't trust to be dependent on third parties for access to our own data in the long term

Isn't Umbrel mostly open source and Docker-based?