AI, photo storage, cameras and networking that live in your house — not in somebody else's datacenter, on somebody else's price list. 2026 is the first year the hardware got cheap enough and the software got good enough that this is a real option for normal people. This site is the honest build log.
why now
Google Photos wants a monthly fee to hold pictures of your kids. Cloud cameras want a monthly fee to let you rewind your own driveway. Every AI tool you like wants $20/mo, and you're running four of them. None of it is outrageous on its own. Together it's a utility bill for things you could own outright.
Meanwhile the other side of the trade quietly got good. Mini PCs crossed the line where they run useful local models. Off-lease enterprise gear is flooding eBay cheap. A used GPU you can buy for a few hundred dollars will transcode your entire photo library and run a 7B model at conversational speed at the same time.
I'm not going to tell you self-hosting is easy or that it's free. It costs a weekend and some hardware, and some of it will break. I write down the parts that break too — that's most of what's useful here, and it's the part the tutorials leave out.
four things, done properly
What actually runs on what. Real tokens/sec on real budgets, not vendor benchmarks.
Immich, hardware transcoding, and a backup plan that survives your house burning down.
Recording locally, watching remotely, paying nobody monthly. No footage leaves the house.
Getting to your stuff from anywhere with zero ports forwarded to the open internet.
complete, priced, and actually running here
The $600 Family Photo Server → Get every photo off Google Photos permanently, onto hardware you own, with hardware-accelerated thumbnails and face search that works. Full parts list, the config, and the four things that went wrong when I did it. Full build · parts list · ~1 weekend The Local AI Box, three budgets $400, $900 and $1,800 builds — with measured tokens/sec instead of marketing claims. In progress Cameras that record to your basement Local NVR, remote viewing, and why most "no subscription" cameras still phone home. In progressno affiliate gear I haven't lived with
Everything recommended on this site is running in my own house right now. If I haven't broken it, fixed it, and lived with it for months, it doesn't get written up.
done-for-you · remote · fixed price
You buy the hardware (I'll tell you exactly what, and it's yours forever). I configure it properly over a screen share, hand it over working, and you own the whole thing outright with nothing to cancel.
Not included: the hardware itself (~$400–700 depending on library size), ongoing management, or anything involving your existing work network. I do one thing well rather than four things badly.
newsletter
One email per build. Parts lists, measured numbers, and what broke. No launches, no affiliate dumps, no "10 AI tools you need."