Show HN: Cloudron – Selfhosting made Simple. Instantly run 50+ ready-to-use apps

[nebulon]

Hi HN!

This is Girish/Johannes from Cloudron - https://cloudron.io!

We have been working on a platform that makes it easy to run apps on your server. It all started when Google Reader was shutdown :-). We initially started writing self-hosted equivalents of popular services but quickly found that there is a ton of great self-hosted software out there. It’s just a lot of work to actually run them and keep them up-to-date.

The idea with Cloudron is simple: you install the Cloudron platform on your server. You can then install apps like NextCloud, GitLab, Rocket.Chat from the App Store. Cloudron completely automates the installation. Seriously - all you have to provide is a domain to install it on and it will take care of the rest like DNS/certs, databases, sandboxing, backups, authentication etc. The App Store provides continuous updates for the apps, so you can use them like any SaaS product (this is all no different from how mobile app stores work).

Most importantly, all your data is completely private/local to the server - we don’t have access to your servers.

Our complete app list - https://cloudron.io/store/index.html.

Seeing is believing. There’s a demo at https://my-demo.cloudron.me (username/password: cloudron).

Would love to get feedback!

[shuriky]

I've been using Cloudron since late December 2017 and have been a very happy customer so far. The guys behind Cloudron are doing a great job with releases, apps, support and community. I really hope they will keep up the great service as they grow in size (it may be challenging to be so hands on, but there are always solutions).

My journey stared with a decision to move away from Google for most of their services. I've looked at various platforms, services, applications that would automate email (at least) hosting and make it as simple as possible (I'm not really interested in learning the details of e-mail management). I've almost settled on either of 2 well known mail specific apps when I stumbled across Cloudron. It does have build-in support for multi domain email hosting and, in addition, really simplifies running a lot of other systems and platforms. And did I say it's literally just clicking a button to get an app running? Email is a bit harder - I think I had to add few values and point my MX records (that was the hardest bit - imagine how dead simple Cloudron makes things).

So, it's been about 9 months running Cloudron. I've got 2 domains, with emails configured for each, few apps (WordPress, NextCloud, etc.). This really allowed me to move away from Google for email, contacts, calendars, cloud, etc. I am definitely a very satisfied customer and am wishing the best of luck to the founders.

[rmdes]

beeen using it since 2 years now and I'm super happy with everything, the idea, the people behind it, the app store, the support, even trying hard I can't find no reason to not try the cloudron approach if you are thinking on owning your data or finding a hassle free solution to self-host clients, no matter your perspective, cloudron allow anyone to jump in the self hosting realm by abstracting most of the hard work of maintaining and running servers into a smooth experience.

[Driky]

Let's say you subscribe to the basic plan, install 10 apps and then unsubscribe. As I understand it your app will continue to run, you just loose update and management abilities linked to the Cloudron sub right ?

[nebulon]

As you said, you wont get further updates to the apps, however everything will continue to run as is. Also you will be able to further manage the server or reconfigure already installed apps. Other features like automatic backups will also keep working.

[sharemywin]

Does any money go back to the app developers?

[gramakri]

Our initial idea was to make a real App Store/marketplace where app authors can publish apps themselves and optionally monetize. A marketplace has the usual catch-22 issue where we need to have enough users and publishers. So as a first step we have taken the app publish/update responsibility ourselves to get users on the platform. Once we have enough users, we will be in a position to work more closely with app authors.

[nebulon]

Currently we are not in a position to do this, it would be great of course. At the moment we do contribute to the upstream projects.

Please note, what we have is not a true app store with pay-per-app, but the subscription is to ensure we have the resources to package, test and support the apps on Cloudron. We have elaborate unit tests for each app as well as do manual testing, since we want to deliver a saas style update experience.

[sharemywin]

seems like you could add a "feature request" tier that pays money back and aggregates feature requests.