Principles
“Home First” is a set of commitments the apps are designed around.
Your hardware, your data
Section titled “Your hardware, your data”Everything runs on a machine in your home. There’s no account to sign up for and no usage being sold. Your data stays on disk you own.
Private by design
Section titled “Private by design”The apps are built so that information only reaches an outside service (an LLM, say) when you’ve explicitly chosen to let it. Privacy is the default, not a setting you have to find.
Open source
Section titled “Open source”The whole project is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and developed in the open at git.bcnelson.dev/home-first/homefirst, mirrored to Codeberg. You can read every line, build it yourself, and change it.
Optional, never required
Section titled “Optional, never required”There’s an optional hosted companion, homefirst.cloud, that handles things a home server can’t do well on its own (like reliable push notifications). It’s strictly optional and lives in a separate repo; the apps run fully without it.