Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

kentonv wrote: post #32

mayankchhabra wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the insightful reply. Everything you said makes total sense. Re noncommercial organizations being permitted users, this was a conscious decision on our part. We're purposefully building Umbrel purely for consumers, and don't plan to serve any commercial or noncommercial organizations. We want to align our incentives directly with consumers instead of enterprises, and this is purely to help us focus on buil…

I see. Well, I hope you are able to succeed at that. For what it's worth, we initially focused on consumer use but weren't able to find a path to revenue there. Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops. I think the problem is that the apps, while fu…

Post by kentonv » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #42

kentonv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. Well, I hope you are able to succeed at that. For what it's worth, we initially focused on consumer use but weren't able to find a path to revenue there. Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops. I think the problem is that the apps, while fu…

To be fair, I think Umbrel has a very different consumer story: Since it has a much stronger crypto focus, it is targeting consumers much more likely to spend (crypto)money, I think, than the average consumer. And a key difference is that Cloudron and Umbrel may monetize selfhosters, which I believe Sandstorm did not endeavor to do at all.

Post by leodriesch » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #29

woojoo666 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If self hosting were as easy and stable as signing up for a cloud service, I think people would switch

How do you suppose that would happen? You need some kind of hardware to self-host.

Post by Jeff_Brown » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

Post by nfgrep » Tue, Jun 07, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #26

candiddevmike wrote: post #16

I think the overlap of folks who want to self host and folks who don't already use a preferred Linux distro or Windows is quite small.

That’s a fair point, but there are lots of people who want one less thing to manage - the underlying infrastructure is a large piece to offload from the mental load of self hosting.