Comment by pedrozieg
2 days ago
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
There is no way to properly make money from fully open protocols. If you do the hard work of research and development, your competitors can just take the work and sell their implementation minus the R&D costs, undercutting you. It's not sustainable.
It's basically what Apple learned during the Macintosh clones era. Churning out countless units of the same stuff isn't that complicated once you have figured out what needs to be copied. Getting the worth-copying state is the hard and expensive part; nobody is going to do it for free.
This can readily be seen in the "free" open-source software world. The vast majority of it is just lower-quality copies of existing software.
I've tried a lot of personal cloud options (ownCloud, a Resilio Sync mesh, CloundMounter + B2) and somehow ended up back on iCloud because of this.
My next experiment is just to use NFS over Nebula/Tailscale and see how much data I can just host off my NAS, but it's surprisingly been quite a journey for a simple problem.
You can't really switch away from iCloud without sacrificing it's deep integration.
The whole whole ecosystem is designed around it.
Don't get me wrong, Apple could've written their software with different upstream options, but they choose not to - hence going away from iCloud forces you to give up on a lot of features
I'm just pointing this out because if you've already attempted different options and went back to iCloud, then trying others isn't likely to be worthwhile, honestly.
You'd first have to accept that moving away from it means sacrificing features such as the photos sync (including delete etc).
That for me has been Dropbox. It's not even a shadow of what it used to be as a sleek, perfect sync tool, but the competition is so bad and getting worse every day (along with Dropbox) that "Dropbox + Cryptomator" is literally the best option I still have. Tresorit seemed to come close, but it's bug-ridden and really sluggish, and their support is painfully useless.
And as someone who has been in Apple's hardware ecosystem for more than a decade now (almost exclusively), I can't in my right mind bring myself to use any of its software/service products (and for good reasons, seeing it go bad to very bad to downright pathetic over the years) except for the OS because that's not really an option. Yes, I do have a small Cryptomator folder syncing to iCloud as well, but that's just because I wanted to have that as a backup sync, and it's a very tiny set of data that I anyway backup to elsewhere.
The bad of it? Yes, keeping everything under one roof really feels simple and easy.
The good? If Apple blocks my a/c today or nukes it, it will take a few hours to few days but I will get back everything single piece of data I have online on a new laptop or phone (Apple or Android or Windows or Linux) - everything! And it's a joy to use specific better/superior options for your software/service needs as per your specific choice!
Even as a techie, I prefer and use iCloud for exactly this reason, especially for stuff I share with family. I don't want me to be the bottleneck for what is considered basic functionality these days.
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
A non-commercial license prevents it from being open-source, and I think already constitutes extremely clear communication about what will happen to users when Umbrel goes bankrupt: they will be stranded, because the license doesn't allow another company to step up and take over maintenance the way an open-source license would.
these companies - if they are so afraid of an OSI approved license - should put certain conditions into their that trigger when they go out of business and the IP gets released
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I’m not worried about “can I, personally, keep this thing running?” so much as “what is the long-term story for the kind of person who buys a turnkey appliance”.
Yes, Umbrel OS is on GitHub and you can already run it on generic NUCs / Pi etc. That’s great. But the value prop of the hardware is the whole bundle: curated apps, painless updates, maybe remote access, maybe backups. If Umbrel-the-company pivots or withers, the repo still being there under a non-commercial license doesn’t guarantee ongoing maintenance, an app store, or support. And the NC clause is exactly what makes it hard for someone else to step in and sell a fully supported forked “Umbrel but maintained” box to non-technical users. So for people like you and me, sure, we can just install it elsewhere; for the target audience of an expensive plug-and-play box, the long-term social contract is still the fragile part.
Ah, okay, yeah, I get you now. I could get behind a splashy section about how users can "walk away at any time" with a roadmap that seems reasonable. I think that fits in with the general ethos of what these things should offer to consumers. I can certainly see why a company wouldn't be keen to advertise "if we die, here's what you can do.", but a way to tell consumers how to gracefully exit doesn't seem so antithetical to a marketing plan, and personally, knowing they've given me an off-ramp does make me more likely to use a thing.
I run umbrel in a VM . For non fiat finops stuff.
I also run Cloudron on a VPS.
I wish both of those solutions had more mindshare. They save me so much time and effort. Especially Cloudron!
I looked at Cloudron and I'm not sure why I would choose this over just throwing in Proxmox on a box and start clicking stuff in their 'app store'.
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> 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.
What will make development sustainable? I mean it could take some time until it gets trackson and also usually open source works if there is a supporting company behind it.
I am going to get it to a point where moderately technical people would be happy to use it over other options, and build a community that contributes. I will continue to work on making it easier to use over time.
HomeFree must be deployed from another machine with Nix installed.
Your mom runs Nix?
No, if you use the installer CD it's a fully UI based install. No command line. No awareness it's even running nix.
Administration is through a web UI.
It could easily be pre-installed on a device like a NUC and delivered to my mom.
Did you read the FAQ?
I've got all this running on a branch but it's still rough. Once it's relatively stable it will be merged to master and the home page completely revamped.
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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
If you already have a NAS I’m not sure what this does for you that just getting a bigger NAS wouln’t?
Isn't Umbrel mostly open source and Docker-based?