Free
$0forever
- Full photo & file backup
- Local semantic photo search
- One device, one person
Not a trial. Everything above works without paying, forever. The server is open source too.
Your photos already have a home.
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 · NO SUBSCRIPTION, EVER
Old laptop / ~$35 SBC→
AiHomeCloud→
Your photos, at home
The choice
Same family photo library. Three ways to keep it.
Not a feature list — a real decision a visitor is actually making right now. Here's the honest math, not a marketing claim.
| AiHomeCloud | Google Photos | Off-the-shelf NAS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every month | $0runs on hardware you already own | $1.99–$9.99Google's published storage tiers | $0 |
| To begin | $0an old laptop, or a ~$35 SBC | $0 | $200+typical entry-level device |
| Where files live | Your house | Google's servers | Your house |
| Who can read them | Only you | Their systems, their terms | Only you |
Figures as published by each service at time of writing. AiHomeCloud's $0 isn't a promotional price — it's what's left after you already own the hardware.
The machinery
How can it actually do that?
One real path, not six feature cards: your phone finds your server on your own network, and nothing else is in the loop.
Your phone
the app
Your server
in your house
Your drive
the files
No accountthe app just finds your server — nothing to sign up for
No relayyour phone talks to your server directly, on your network
No middle serverAiHomeCloud the company is never in this path
What actually happens
Every security promise, in both languages.
Every security promise, twice: once for the family that wants it to work, once for the homelab that wants to verify.
Your phone
Plain wordsFinds itself. On home Wi-Fi, the phone locates your server automatically — nothing to type, nothing to configure.mDNS on your LAN — service _aihomecloud._tcp.local
Plain wordsTrust, once. Your phone learns your server's identity the first time they meet, and refuses impostors after that.TLS 1.3 · trust-on-first-use certificate pinning
Plain wordsIdentity can't be faked. Even if someone broke into the server software, they still couldn't pretend to be your server.Certificate rotation signed by a root-owned process the network-facing API can never touch
Your server
Plain wordsSearch stays home. Type "diwali sparklers" and find the photo — the understanding happens inside your house.On-device semantic embedding model · zero egress
Plain wordsNothing to breach. There are no AiHomeCloud storage servers holding your life — nothing to leak, nothing to mine.Zero-retention architecture · media and embeddings never transit a third-party server
Your disk
0
bytes 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.
And the pricing, itemized — not "contact sales"
Same rule: no fine print, no vague tiers. Here's precisely what's free forever, and precisely what the one optional upgrade adds.
AiHomeCloud Plus
$9.99one-time · yours forever
Early price, now $9.99
Future price, later $19.99
- Everything in Free
- A private space per family member
- Remote access — no relay, no third party
- TV app & cross-device playback resume
Price rises to $19.99 later. Buy now and $9.99 is locked in, forever — a thank-you for being early, not a fake discount.
No subscription.·No trial period.·No storage meter.
Also by Chaitra Paras
Other things we've built.
FinPath
FIRE and net-worth tracking, modeled entirely on-device. No account, no cloud, no ads.
AHC Player
A private, Netflix-style player for Android TV / Fire TV — streams from AiHomeCloud, SMB, or local storage.
WaterTank
Automates a home water pump over Bluetooth via an ESP32 — no Wi-Fi required.
Ownership
"Anyone can build an app with AI now. Why pay for this one?"
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, building this — AI sped the typing up; it didn't do the thinking, the testing, or the fixing.
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.
— Chaitra Paras
The maker
Built by two people who had the same problem you do.
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.
No venture fund, no growth team, no exit plan. We both work full-time jobs, trying to be present as mother and father for our baby daughter. AiHomeCloud is what's left of our evenings.
— Chaitra & ParasIndia
These are your photos.
They should live somewhere you control.