Community-owned cloud
The cloud, brought home.
CoralStack is an open-source template for replacing iCloud Photos, your password manager, your music library, and your AI chat — with services running on a small computer in someone's home. Someone you know. Built for households, friend groups, and co-ops.
Six services. One login. One machine you can point to.
Why now
Imagine your photos, your passwords, and your everyday AI living on a small computer you can point to — in a home, in your community, on hardware that belongs to people you know. Not rented. Not mined. Just yours.
That's more possible now than it's been in years. The tools got good: open-source software, end-to-end encryption, and hardware cheap enough to sit on a shelf. What used to take a data center now fits in a room.
It's also more worth doing. As photos, passwords, and daily reasoning move deeper into a handful of platforms — Google retired its Photos Library API in 2025, cloud infrastructure keeps consolidating (three companies now hold 85% of Canada's market), AI is following the same path — the gap between the people who own the infrastructure and the people who merely rent it only widens. It's the same story Gary Stevenson tells about wealth: ownership compounds, and renting quietly costs you more every year.
CoralStack is a small move to the ownership side of that line — boring, durable, and genuinely yours. Not a different landlord.
What you get
Your camera roll backs up automatically, end-to-end encrypted. Not even the server can see your pictures. Albums, sharing, search — on all your devices.
powered by Ente
A full password manager with apps for every phone and browser, autofill included. Your vault is encrypted with a passphrase only you know.
powered by Vaultwarden, Bitwarden-compatible
Your community's media library, streaming to your phone, laptop, and TV. Your music collection lives here too — owned, not rented.
powered by Jellyfin
A capable AI assistant running on community hardware with open models. Conversations never leave the building.
powered by Open WebUI
A passkey: your fingerprint or face, no passwords to remember, nothing to phish. Every service above accepts it.
powered by Pocket ID
A public status page shows exactly what's up and what's down. No "we're aware of an issue."
powered by Uptime Kuma
The honest comparison
| You use today | CoralStack today |
|---|---|
| iCloud / Google Photos | Ente — e2ee photo backup, sharing, search |
| 1Password / iCloud Keychain | Vaultwarden — full Bitwarden apps |
| Apple Music (your library) | Jellyfin — your owned collection, streamed |
| ChatGPT-style assistant | Open WebUI + open models |
| Spotify-style catalogs | Plays what you own. Buy from Bandcamp/Qobuz, rip CDs — guidance coming |
| iCloud Contacts & Calendar | Not yet. Keep iCloud for these, or self-host Baikal/Radicale alongside |
| iCloud Drive / file sync | Not yet. Syncthing or Seafile work alongside if you need it |
No lock-in in either direction: photos, passwords, and media all export in standard formats. Leaving CoralStack is documented the same as joining.
How it works
Everything in the stack is open source, and the whole configuration is public: the CoralStack repo.
No surprises
CoralStack is early-stage. One community runs it today, operated by the maintainer. If that excites rather than worries you, you're the audience.
For host-admins
Self-hosting already works — for the technical. You can probably solve photos, passwords, and AI for yourself; most people can't, and that's the whole gap: for two decades this movement has freed the technophiles and left everyone else on the rented internet. Your parents, your neighbours, the co-op down the road don't need to learn Linux — they need to know someone who has. That's you.
CoralStack is built so one person's weekend covers a whole household, not just themselves. Everything the maintainer's community runs is in one public repo: infrastructure as code, setup script, runbooks, backup and recovery, onboarding guides for you and your members.
You'd need: a dedicated mini-PC (never your daily-driver machine), Ubuntu Server, a domain, a weekend to set up, and the temperament to be your community's sysadmin. AGPL-3.0 — free, forever, copyleft.
Talk to us before you deploy. Not because you must — because the install has so far been run by one person, and you'd be among the first to change that. Be the person who hosts for the people who can't host for themselves. We want to hear where it breaks.
Questions
Nextcloud is one app trying to be everything. CoralStack composes the best dedicated open-source app for each job — Ente for photos, Vaultwarden for passwords, Jellyfin for media — behind one login. Different trade-off, more moving parts, better apps. Both are legitimate; this is ours.
Photos and passwords are end-to-end encrypted — the person running the server cannot read them, by design, ever. Backups are nightly, encrypted, off-site, and restore-tested. And your host is someone you know, accountable to you at the dinner table — not a support queue.
The software is free and open source. Real costs: the hardware (~a mini-PC), a domain, and off-site backup storage — typically split across the community. There's no company here, no accounts, no billing.
Backups + a documented rebuild procedure. The recovery runbooks are public in the repo — judge them yourself.
Yes, and it's documented. Ente exports your originals, Bitwarden vaults export to standard formats, media files are just files. An alternative you can't leave is just another landlord.
Get in touch
Whether you'd join an existing community or host for your own — start with an email.