A home cloud · not a cloud service
AiHomeCloud turns hardware you already own — the old laptop in a drawer, a spare PC, or a small SBC like a Raspberry Pi or Radxa board costing about $35 — into a private backup server for your family's photos and files. Everything stays in your house, on your disk, under your rules.
Free tier is the full product · Server is AGPL-3.0 · Live on Google Play
An old laptop, a retired desktop, or a small SBC — a Raspberry Pi, a Radxa, or similar — costing about $35. Install the open-source server. If it can sit in a corner and stay on, it can be your cloud.
The Android app finds your server over home Wi-Fi automatically. No IP addresses to type, no port forwarding, no account creation — it just shows up.
Photos and files copy themselves to your machine. Search them in plain words — “ammi at the beach” — with a model that runs inside your home, not in a datacenter.
It is not a cloud. There is no “our end.”
0bytes of your data stored on AiHomeCloud's servers
We couldn't sell, leak, or lose your files even if we wanted to. We don't have them. The machine in your hallway does.
The same four guarantees, twice: once for the family that just wants it to work, once for the homelab that wants to verify.
mDNS discovery on the LAN · service _aihomecloud._tcp.local · resolvable with dns-sd or Avahi
TLS 1.3 · trust-on-first-use certificate pinning · first contact seals the identity, every later connection must match it
certificate rotation signed by a root-owned process the network-facing API can never touch · a compromised API cannot forge server identity
on-device semantic embedding model · photos and queries processed locally · zero egress
Don't take this page's word. Take the code.
The entire backend server is public and AGPL-3.0 licensed. Read it, audit it, fork it, run it.
github.com/chaitraparas/aihomecloud-server ↗The app is free, complete, and stays free. AiHomeCloud Plus is one optional add-on for households that want convenience on top — priced plainly, and explained below without fine print.
$0forever
Not a trial, not a teaser. The free tier is the product — everything in chapters 01–03 works without paying, forever. The server is open source too, so if you'd rather build your own multi-user setup or remote access yourself, nothing stops you — Plus just does that work for you.
$19.99$9.99one-time · yours forever
An honest deal, not a permanent “sale”: the price rises to $19.99 later. Buy now and $9.99 is locked in for you, forever — a proper thank-you for being early, not a fake discount.
Start free; upgrade only if you want the convenience. Get the app free
The same family photo library, three ways to keep it:
| AiHomeCloud | Google Photos | Off-the-shelf NAS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every month | $0 | $1.99–$9.99 | $0 |
| To begin | $0 — hardware you already own | $0 | $200+ for the device |
| Room for photos | Whatever your drive holds | 15–200 GB, by tier | Whatever you install |
| Where files live | Your house | Their servers — data leaves the house | Your house |
| Who can read them | Only you | Their systems, their terms | Only you |
Google Photos figures per its published storage tiers; NAS figure is a typical entry device. AiHomeCloud runs on what you already have — even a ~$35 SBC.
From the people who build it — no script, no funnel.
A fair question, and honestly, the first version did come together fast. What that skips: the first version was maybe 20% of the real work.
AiHomeCloud took about a year, start to finish — writing the specs, designing around real families, testing on real hardware bought with our own money, and more review cycles than we'll admit. Well over $1,000 went to AI subscriptions along the way. AI sped the typing up; it didn't do the thinking, the testing, or the fixing.
And the other 80% never ends: security fixes, Android breaking something new every release, the features people actually ask for. Most solo open-source projects don't die because the code was bad — they fade quietly, when the people behind them stop feeling that anyone cares.
You never have to pay. The free tier is the complete product for one person, and it will stay that way. But if AiHomeCloud earns its place in your home, Plus is a genuine way to keep it alive and improving. We're not too proud to say it matters.
— Chaitra Paras
It began the day we realised our own family was paying Google every month to keep our own memories — while a perfectly good laptop sat in a drawer doing nothing. So we put those two facts together, and about a year later, this existed.
No venture fund, no growth team, no exit plan. Just software we're proud to put our name on, running on hardware you own, answerable to the people who use it.
We both work full-time jobs. Chaitra and Paras, trying to be present as mother and father for our baby daughter — someone we hope is a little proud of this one day. AiHomeCloud is what's left of our evenings, and our way of giving back, in whatever small way we can, to the open-source and homelab community that taught us most of what we know.
— Chaitra & ParasIndia