Self-hosting Homaic — Homaic Help

Homaic is AGPL-licensed open source. You can run the entire platform on your own infrastructure — your data never leaves your hardware, your AI calls run against your keys, your MCP clients connect directly to your host. No Homaic account required.

This is real. Not a freemium-tier marketing footnote.

Requirements

A server you can run Docker or Node on. A Raspberry Pi 5 is enough for a single-household manifest. A small VPS works for the same size at lower latency.
A PostgreSQL 15+ database. Supabase (self-hosted), a managed Postgres, or Postgres on the same host all work.
A domain you control and a TLS certificate for it (Let's Encrypt is fine).
Optional: an Anthropic, OpenAI, or compatible API key if you want Mode A AI features. Without one, Mode B (BYO AI via MCP) still works.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/homaic/homaic-platform
cd homaic-platform
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env — set DATABASE_URL, NEXTAUTH_URL, optional ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
pnpm install
pnpm db:migrate
pnpm build
pnpm start

Full setup, including a Docker Compose file with a bundled Postgres, lives in the repo README.md and docs/self-hosting/. The maintained path is Docker Compose; bare-metal Node is supported but expects you to know what you're doing.

Pointing your MCP client at your host

Same OAuth flow as Homaic-hosted, different URL. In Claude Code, Cursor, or Cline, set the MCP server URL to https://your-host.example.com/mcp. The OAuth flow runs against your self-hosted instance; the bearer token is stored by your client.

If you've been running Homaic-hosted and you migrate, run an export (Exporting your data), import it into your self-hosted instance, and re-authenticate your MCP client against the new URL.

What you give up

Mode A AI included with the plan. You pay your own AI costs (per-call against your Anthropic / OpenAI key). For small households, this is cheaper than the hosted plan; for AI-heavy use, the hosted plan can be cheaper because of bulk pricing.
Customer support. Self-hosted users get GitHub issues, the AGPL community, and the docs. No SLA.
Automatic updates. You pull updates from the repo and run migrations yourself. Most updates are uneventful; some require attention. The release notes call out anything load-bearing.

What you keep

All your data. Always.
Full feature parity with hosted (excluding the bundled AI tier).
The same UI, the same MCP tools, the same data export, the same brief generator, the same configurators.

Keeping your instance updated

cd homaic-platform
git pull
pnpm install
pnpm db:migrate
pnpm build
# restart your process manager (systemd, pm2, docker compose up -d)