Umbrel – Personal Cloud

A decade of “personal cloud box” attempts has shown that the hard part isn’t the hardware, it’s the long-term social contract. Synology/WD/My Cloud/etc all eventually hit the same wall: once the company pivots or dies, you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control, holding the most irreplaceable thing you own: your data. If you’re going to charge an Apple-like premium on commodity mini-PC hardware, you really have to over-communicate what happens if Umbrel-the-company disappears or changes direction: how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?

The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with. That’s mostly about boring stuff: automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies, and clear guarantees about what runs locally vs phoning home. If Umbrel leans into being forkable and portable across generic hardware, it has a shot at being trusted infrastructure instead of just another pretty NAS that people regret once the marketing site goes dark.

I am uninterested in purchasing proprietary hardware running a proprietary operating system that'll work (maybe) for some amount of time. Sure, it's technically self hosted. But you can't extend it (without their proprietary app store). It doesn't seem like you can write your own apps without registering, or side load them. Details are extremely thin on the site, so let me know if I'm wrong.

Hell, all the compelling software isn't even theirs! They're just running other OSS apps, and god knows whether you'll be able to manage or upgrade it.

Arguably, this is the worst of all worlds: you're paying the overhead of closed hardware, running closed software that you don't control, and sort of just crossing your fingers that they don't pull the rug out from underneath you. You'd be infinitely better off buying a comparable NUC and spending an afternoon loading up Docker on it. Shit like this is genuinely insulting to the demographic of folks who should be the target audience.

I like Umbrel’s technical approach: Its apps are just docker compose files with a little extra, making it very easy to support. The UI layer is Next JS, which gives tight coupling with the backend (so good state sync).

I also like their marketing approach: They really have a nice app store and a nice page for each app.

I did not like the reliability around app installations and the disappointment that it’s actually quite proprietary.

I wish there was a standard „server app“ format similar to what Umbrel uses with a strong ecosystem and multiple solutions. It‘s a key missing piece to self hosting stuff, IMO.

Looks like they're selling an N150 based "Mini PC" for $500.

You can get a very similar 16GB RAM, 1TB storage Minipc in the same form factor from Amazon for around $260 so looks like you're paying almost twice the price for the NAS-type software?

> Store your files

On a non-backup "Personal Cloud" that does not even have a RAID 1 for a bit of redundancy? Big no no.

It looks really cool, but I really dislike products that encourage dangerous behaviors, especially to users that might completely be unaware and think about replacing their Apple or Google Cloud with this so called "personal cloud".

This is hard, because on one hand I do love self-hosting (I self-host a number of the services they list in their "App Store") but I don't quite get the target market for this (probably because I'm not in it).

The lack of RAID or similar means that you've traded the cloud for 1 component losing all your data. Coupled with the lack of any (obvious) backup solution is concerning. Do you really want to backup your files/images to a single point of failure? If this is supposed to be turn-key then I think there are opportunities to sell cloud backup as an add-on but as-is you are handing people a ticking time bomb.

I'm not a fan of the Crypto angle highlighted in the store, it's a red flag.

I'm interested in what the app compatibility story is here. Like how much post-install configuration are they handling?

> Sonarr on umbrelOS will automatically connect to download clients installed from the Umbrel App Store. Choose from Transmission, qBittorerent, and SABnzbd. Simply install your preferred client(s).

Does that mean they have post-install hooks (on both Sonarr and the download client's end) to configure those? Or is that just speak for "Yeah, you can easily configure XYZ download client that you also installed".

All-in-all it seems overpriced and limited for what it's offering and that's all assuming they stick around and don't peter out. Maybe this is a good first step for someone interested in this but I feel like the type of person interested in this either already can figure out how to set it up themselves (Synology, UnRaid, Docker, etc) or will need a lot of handholding when things break/don't work as expected.

It's entirely possible that there are a lot of people that this would be good for, I just don't know who it would be.

Lastly, no mention of anything like SSO or Remote Access (both things that could be a good value-add IMHO alongside cloud backup). It's overly nerdy in some ways and underly nerdy in others which is why I can't figure out the target audience.

This is a hard problem. Offering autonomy and ownership of data to non-techy people is HARD.

Although I'm not at all convinced Umbrel is the right answer, they seem to be on the right track. Can they empower regular people to own their data without causing havoc down the road if they run out of money and go out of business? I'm sceptical, but I do respect them for trying to tackle this head on. But having skimmed their website, they could do a better job of building trust and answer the long-term question of what happens if they fail.

I do believe this is a growing market, giving people who are fed up with BigTech a way out that does not require that you are a nerd. I am only worried people can be scared it this goes wrong. Paying a premium for rather basic hardware if the setup and software is super smooth could be perfectly acceptable to non-techies that do not at all want the hassle of maintaining a custom NAS.

It's always good to see some movement in the self-hosted space but I'm wondering who is this for.

People like myself are all in and enjoy the technical aspects of running Proxmox/NixOS/Docker/Kubernetes on our own hardware, building the systems exactly as we like and (hopefully) with a sound backup strategy and without a dependency on a company providing an appliance-like experience.

Running services is not trivial and solutions like this help with getting started but not with the really hard aspects on how to operate services safely with little risk of data loss.

I'm wondering if this would be more accessible and safer to operate if instead of relying on users having their own hardware it would require users to bring their a VPS (removing the need of managing hardware) and object storage (for managed backups).

I want a personal cloud, but one that can be hosted in an actual cloud.

Ideally, I think we would something like Sandstorm but that can be deployed on everything from a home server to a Docker-based cloud service like Google Cloud Run or... Amazon Fargate (I'm not too familiar with their services).

I don't use the cloud for scaling, but so that I never have to worry about power, internet, or machine-level security.

I'm very pleased that it seems like there is a real movement happening in the self-hosted space. I've been self-hosting for about 6 months and actually started with umbrel because the UI looks so polished, which is comforting for people like me who didn't live in the CL. But there's a reason dev and eng tools always have the CL fallback, the GUI limits customization and hacking. And I hit those limits super fast on Umbrel. Then I moved to dokploy, then coolify, and finally `ssh homelab "cd /opt/<homelab>/stacks/<app> && docker compose up -d"`, and I couldn't be happier to tinker to my heart's desire.

The biggest upgrade of this movement is privacy & data sovereignty, so I hope it continues growing, and hope Umbrel has success in being a gateway for a lot of selfhost-curious.

I'd really love to see an off the shelf distributed FS server in a NUC form factor that you plug in and is largely self-managed. Automatic atomic updates, QR codes to add a server to your swarm, manage it through a browser, client side encryption so a compromised server doesn't mean data exposure. If you want to get fancy, you could have user quotas so you and all your friends set up a single swarm with shared storage and you'd have a very distributed cloud. Optionally add a hetzner instance to the swarm.

So difficult but look somebody has to try. For us to make any progress we need attempts at this. Package the hardware and software, find a target demographic and go after it. I don't know if there's a mistake in going too broad or not having a tailored OS with a smaller footprint or being the general utility but we only learn through these tests. Good luck Umbrel team!