A server for your household
Your photos.
Your files.
Your server.
Photos, files, notes, passwords, media: the things that make up your life, on a machine that belongs to you instead of a company. We set it up and keep it running. You just use your apps.
How it works
One server. Your apps. We handle the rest.
Malmo gives you a whole server of your own and installs the apps you pick on it. No cables, no spare laptop in a closet, no weekend spent reading forum posts about certificates.
A machine of your own
A whole virtual machine, yours alone. Not a folder inside someone else's database, not an account you rent: a server you could physically walk away with.
Install apps in a click
Photos, files, notes, passwords, music, movies. Pick from a curated catalog and it's running a minute later. Uninstall an app and your files stay right where they are.
Nothing to maintain
Provisioning, DNS, certificates, backups, and updates are ours to worry about. Self-hosting without the second job that usually comes with it.
Why ownership matters
Your life shouldn't live in someone else's account.
Your photos, your messages, your documents: a handful of companies hold all of it, mine it to sell ads, change the price when it suits them, and can lock you out of a decade of memories with an automated email. Malmo starts from the opposite premise.
Nobody reads your data
Your files sit on your own server. There's no ad business behind it, no model being trained on your photos, and no terms-of-service update that quietly changes the deal.
Files, not libraries
Your photos live in ~/Photos/, plain folders you can browse, copy to a hard
drive, or open with anything. Not locked inside one app's private format.
Take it home for real
Start on our cloud. Move the whole thing to a mini PC on your own shelf whenever you feel like it. Same apps, same data, same setup, just running under your roof.
The cost of renting vs. owning
One bill instead of a dozen.
Cloud storage for the photos. A bigger plan because the phone backup filled it up. A notes app. A password manager. A streaming service for music you already own. Each one small, all of them forever. Malmo runs the open-source equivalents on a server you own, at compute-cost-plus.
A typical household stack
- Cloud storage (Dropbox, Drive) $12/mo
- Photo storage (iCloud, Google One) $10/mo
- Password manager (1Password) $8/mo
- Notes (Notion) $10/mo
- Music streaming $11/mo
Every month, forever, with prices that creep up.
The same apps on Malmo
- File sync (Nextcloud) included
- Photo management (Immich) included
- Passwords (Vaultwarden) included
- Notes (Memos) included
- Music (Navidrome) included
One plan for the whole house. No per-person charge, no storage tiers, no bill that creeps up.
The apps themselves are free. You pay for the compute and storage they run on, plus a small flat markup for keeping the machine provisioned, patched, and backed up. Add more only if you size the server up.
Apps people actually run at home.
The marketplace is curated, not encyclopedic. Here's what most people start with:
Photos
Immich: phone backup, albums, and search, on your own server.
Files
Nextcloud, Seafile: sync across your laptop and phone, no storage tiers.
Notes and bookmarks
SiYuan, Readeck: everything you write down and save to read later.
Passwords
Vaultwarden: works with the Bitwarden apps, but the vault lives on your box.
Music and movies
Jellyfin, Navidrome: your own library, no ads, nothing pulled from the catalog.
Projects and tinkering
Gitea, databases, agents: your own infrastructure for your own projects.
You could run this yourself.
And then the certificates, the DNS, the backups, the updates, and the 2 AM debugging would be yours too. Malmo is that plumbing done once, for you. This isn't self-hosting made easy; it's managed infrastructure that stays yours.
Updates and backups
Security patches, app updates, and daily backups happen without you. Nothing to remember.
Private by default
Every app sits behind your login. Nothing on your server is open to anyone else unless you decide to share it.
Open and auditable
The OS is open source. If you're the sort of person who wants to read the code, all of it is there.
Support
Email support for anything to do with your server. Help with an individual app depends on its developer.
Start hosted. Leave whenever.
The export is the product, not a promise buried in a help page.
One click exports the lot: your files, the apps you installed, and the configuration behind them. It's an ordinary archive, not a proprietary backup format, so you can open it, copy it to a hard drive, or restore it onto any machine running Malmo, whether that's a mini PC in a drawer or a small server you rent yourself.
We make our money from the marketplace, not from holding your photos hostage. If you leave, you leave with all of it.