One app on your home network. Your photos, your inventory, your kids' movies. No subscription. No cloud. No compromise.
Your family's photos should not live on someone else's servers. They should live on your shelf.
Your home inventory should not depend on someone else's uptime. It should work when the internet is down.
Your kids' movie night should not be programmed by an algorithm. It should be programmed by you.
Your family's records should not be one Terms of Service change away from gone. They should be one file you can copy to a thumb drive.
Your family should not be the product. Nothing leaves the house. Period.
Browse your entire photo and video collection through a beautiful file browser. Stream movies and music over your home network. Kids Mode gives each child a curated library you control. No ads. No recommendations. No autoplay.
Walk each room with your phone and record what's in it: snap a photo, type the serial number, what you paid, a note about where the receipt is. Add it up by room or for the whole house. It all lives in one plain database file on your own hardware — the record an adjuster asks for, kept where you can find it.
A separate, PIN-gated screen with big, friendly tiles that shows only the folders you’ve marked safe — nothing else on the drive exists as far as it's concerned. No algorithm. No suggestions. No way out without your PIN. You decide what your children see.
Keep the pantry list, the family recipes, this week's meals and the shopping list on one screen the whole house can reach — on your own hardware, not in someone else’s cloud. Every list prints for the fridge. Nothing here is sold to a grocery chain or fed to an ad.
Notes, contacts, the family calendar, and a record of where every important paper is kept — the deed, the policies, the letter you’d want them to read — all on your own hardware instead of scattered across inboxes and cloud drives. If something happens to you, your family knows exactly where to look.
SQLite is a file — copy it to a USB drive and you have a backup. Your media files are regular files on a regular filesystem. No proprietary format. No cloud sync. No account with anyone — the only login is the one on your own machine.
RunBackHome isn't a website you sign up for. It's a small program you run on a machine you own, and your family opens it in a browser on your home Wi‑Fi. Three parts, no cloud in any of them.
An old laptop, a mini PC, or a small home server — anything that can run Node.js 22.5 or newer. Plug in the drive that already holds your photos, videos, and music — RunBackHome reads it right where it sits and never moves or copies a thing. That's the whole hardware list.
Two dependencies, no build step, no Docker. Once the download is in your hands, it's npm install, then npm start. The first time you open it, a setup screen creates the first account in the house — yours — points it at the folder on that drive where your photos, videos, and music live, and sets the Kids Mode PIN. Everyone else joins from the Sign up page at that same address.
Each person in the house opens the same address in any browser. Nothing leaves your network. Your whole home lives in one small folder — a single SQLite database and the photos of your things — copy that folder to a USB drive and you've made a backup.
The public download isn't posted yet — we're finishing it before we hand it out. The waitlist is how you'll hear the day it is. If you'd rather not wait, Matt will set it up in your house.
No subscription. No feature gates. No trial that expires. You run it on your own computer, and it stays yours.
The download isn't posted yet — the waitlist is how you'll hear the day it is.
Join the WaitlistPricing, if any, will be announced when it exists — not before. There's no separate list for this; the waitlist is the only one we keep.
Join the WaitlistMy family's photos were in Google Photos. Our movies were on a hard drive in the closet. Our home inventory existed on a napkin somewhere. When Google changed their storage terms, I realized: we'd handed our memories to a company that could change the rules anytime. I'm a developer. So I built something for my family.
Leave your email and you'll hear the day the download is posted. That's all it's for — no newsletter, and your address stays on our own server.