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Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#141

Post by gsreenivas »

rubatuga wrote: post #133
solarkraft wrote: post #103

Many people here, including myself, are heavily turned off by the mandatory subscription that costs as much for 2 years as an entire device. However, the service provided as part of the subscription, a static IP address forwarding to your device without terminating the TLS connection is actually cool. For about 30$/year (24$ sounds good), I'd absolutely buy that alone, since that's the key to the tag line - truly pri…

Not directly competing with Helm, but we at Hoppy Network provide a static IP over WireGuard. It came out of a desire for "truly private email". We provide: Clean IPv4 + IPv6 address, Reverse DNS, unblocked ports, unfiltered ICMP It's priced reasonably to keep bad actors out: https://hoppy.network We have a $60/year plan in the works, which will be available before the end of this year.

Very cool - looking forward to seeing the new plan. I think this is a great solution for people who want to bring their own hardware.

When you consider that we include a domain registration and offsite encrypted backups, our subscription pricing is fairly comparable.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#142

Post by carderne »

gsreenivas wrote: post #138
solarkraft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subscription not being optional ("We don't make the subscription optional at this time", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28351035 ), with unspecified consequences of not having one. One thing I definitely gather from that comment is that E-Mails wouldn't work, which appears to be the main selling point of the device.

There is an ongoing cost for email to work (static IP, DNS, tunneling for traffic) - this is why there is a subscription. It's not very complicated or malicious. If a customer doesn't want a subscription, they can still use the Helm on their local network and get access to all their data. Running without a subscription is not something we currently support because of a lot of variables that can prevent email from wor…

So it sounds like if you are acquired/close shop/triple your fees, the hardware will continue working with a limited feature set forever. If HN-type people are at all your target market, I’d make this a lot clearer somewhere. After the umpteenth time, people are wary of hardware that randomly turns into bricks. It’s got nothing to do with “big tech”.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#143

Post by gsreenivas »

Talanes wrote: post #119
gsreenivas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are lumping in all tech companies in with big tech, we should all be concerned about that.

People who are consciously trying to de-couple from big tech are the same people who are conscious about lock-in effects.

There isn't any lock-in using a Helm. You can always access and export your data on the LAN using standards-based clients to get your data wherever you'd like it to be.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#144

Post by gsreenivas »

kortilla wrote: post #94
sneak wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the TLS is terminated on the device and all it's using AWS for is a static ip and inbound port for email, that seems pretty harmless.

Seems like a stupid design decision at that point to have a dedicated instance per user. For a pass-through they could multiplex tens of thousands of customers easily onto a single instance.

Please read up on how email works before arriving at this conclusion.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#145

Post by emptysongglass »

eps wrote: post #22
old-gregg wrote: post #12

I care about owning my own data very much. This makes me conservative when it comes to these solutions, despite otherwise being an early adopter of everything tech. For that reason I always recommend Synology NAS machines. They have been around forever, they work for years on autopilot and feel very similar to a microwave in terms of operational overhead. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. But most importantly, the…

Synology boxes phone home, to Chinese IP space no less.

I think it's important to point out Synology is a Taiwanese company, not Chinese.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#146

Post by not_exactly__ »

allset_ wrote: post #35
satyanash wrote: post #3

Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.

The required subscription also means it's useless if they go out of business.

Yes. But it’s also useless if they go out of business period. I know, I know, opensource it in the event of bankruptcy and continue receiving security updates and what not. But when as that ever actually panned out?

Tbh, I don’t know why subscriptions get such a bad rap on HN. recurring revenue (ie subscription) is actually one of the best tool we have for ensuring the products/services we depend on don’t go under.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#147

Post by [deleted] »

xvector wrote: post #41
allset_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The required subscription also means it's useless if they go out of business.

That's one of the biggest problems with subscription services. My favorite band's album was pulled from Spotify. Wouldn't have been a concern if I had set up Lidarr on my NAS.

[deleted]

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#148

Post by diftraku »

gsreenivas wrote: post #143
Talanes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are consciously trying to de-couple from big tech are the same people who are conscious about lock-in effects.

There isn't any lock-in using a Helm. You can always access and export your data on the LAN using standards-based clients to get your data wherever you'd like it to be.

You say "standards-based clients", does this mean I do not have direct access to the filesystem? Or a shell account for that matter?

Using email as an example, having to transfer email with drag'n'drop in something like Thunderbird is clunky, slow but works to a degree.

Having direct access to the mailbox directory on the filesystem would make it easier to transfer out/in (assuming you already have your emails in the same format).

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#149

Post by 3np »

rubatuga wrote: post #133
solarkraft wrote: post #103

Many people here, including myself, are heavily turned off by the mandatory subscription that costs as much for 2 years as an entire device. However, the service provided as part of the subscription, a static IP address forwarding to your device without terminating the TLS connection is actually cool. For about 30$/year (24$ sounds good), I'd absolutely buy that alone, since that's the key to the tag line - truly pri…

Not directly competing with Helm, but we at Hoppy Network provide a static IP over WireGuard. It came out of a desire for "truly private email". We provide: Clean IPv4 + IPv6 address, Reverse DNS, unblocked ports, unfiltered ICMP It's priced reasonably to keep bad actors out: https://hoppy.network We have a $60/year plan in the works, which will be available before the end of this year.

Awesome, I was just looking for something like this the other day! SEO feedback: Try to be discoverable via term like "ipv4 tunnel provider", you may get more search leads. In my mind I was looking for an inverse Hurricane Electric.

Also, do you have any plans at all to accept payments via cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin? That would make you guys a no-brainer.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#150

Post by piaste »

remram wrote: post #44
codetrotter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an onli…

As I said, it is legal, but strikes me as unnecessarily unfriendly. It is likely that I have unrealistic expectations, but putting their modified source code on some "archived" GitHub or similar would have been easy and free. Looking around at Purism, Pine, and remarkable, they don't make it that easy either, so I guess my complaint shouldn't be directed at Helm specifically. My point is that we're not in 1997 anymor…

> but putting their modified source code on some "archived" GitHub or similar would have been easy and free.

You still need to set up mirroring to keep it up-to-date, and janitor tags so that it matches whatever the customer actually received.

Much more importantly, you run the risk of a classic 'whoops I pushed an API key' blunder if your code gets auto-mirrored to a public repo.

Writing "if you're a human and you want the source code we'll give it to you" costs them about thirty seconds, satisfies the FSF, and carries zero risks.

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