Vulos — Your own server. Your own AI.

How it works

Your box. Your OS.
Reachable anywhere.

The whole model in one line: you run Vulos OS on hardware you own, it holds your desktop, apps, files and private AI, and the Relay makes it reachable from any browser — carrying ciphertext it can’t read. Our cloud is optional, and only ever provides reachability and encrypted backup.

Box → OS → relay → device · the box is the authority

01

You run it

Boot Vulos OS on bare metal, a VPS, or Vulos-managed hardware. The open-source OS costs $0 to self-host.

02

The OS is the authority

Your desktop, apps, files and private AI all live on your box — never in a shared central database.

03

Relay reaches it

A single sovereign ingress — direct-first, relay-fallback — carries ciphertext it can’t open. No open ports.

04

You, anywhere

Sign in once and reach the same desktop from any browser, laptop or phone. Walk away with all of it anytime.

The operating system

A web-first operating system,
built on Debian Linux.

Web apps run as first-class citizens in the browser. Native Linux GUI apps — GIMP, LibreOffice, Blender, games via Wine and Lutris — stream individual windows on demand over WebRTC. The shell, the file manager, the terminal, the dock: a real OS that happens to live in a tab.

shell · windows · dock

01

Web-native shell

Windows, dock, file manager, terminal, settings — a real OS shell rendered in the browser. Open it from your laptop, phone, or any browser anywhere and you get the same desktop.

02

Web-app sovereignty

Self-host the apps you would rent from SaaS. Memos, Navidrome, Uptime Kuma, Vaultwarden — installed as proper OS apps with their own subdomain and isolated namespace. Not iframes, not bookmarks.

03

Peering, not federation

Every Vulos instance is a server with an Ed25519 identity and a vulos:<id> URI. Instances message, share files, and place WebRTC calls directly. No middleman. No account on someone else’s server.

04

Real baremetal

Flash the same image to a USB stick. Boot into a labwc/cage compositor that renders the browser shell fullscreen, with native Linux app windows beside it. The same OS, end to end.

Vulos in motion

What you actually run.

Real screenshots from the open-source OS — the home you land in, every device and cloud node in one roster, the app hub, your files and a real terminal. The cloud is the optional layer; this is the OS.

Vulos — Instances — Instancesdevice · cloud · offline — one roster

Vulos — App Hub — App Hubapps install from a signed catalogue

Vulos — Files — Filesyour unified store · folders · versions

Vulos — Terminal — Terminala real shell on your own box

The core

Three things at the core.
Every one is yours to run.

At the heart of Vulos are three sovereign surfaces: the OS your box runs, the Relay that reaches it from anywhere, and the open-source Management control plane that runs the whole deployment. Run them on your own box, or self-host the open-source engine behind each — same software either way, no fork. Everything else is a standalone app you install from the app store and run independently.

Vulos OSThe sovereign desktop — bare metal to browser.A web-native operating system with a real desktop shell — windows, dock, file manager, terminal — that boots on real hardware and streams to any browser. Management is folded in: your box runs itself.Learn more OfisiOffice suite — docs, sheets, slides, whiteboard.A real office suite — documents, sheets, slides and a collaborative whiteboard doc-type — synced live over CRDTs on your own storage.Learn more FilesYour unified store, inside the OS.A Drive-like unified per-account store built into the OS — folders, versions and sharing, on your own S3-compatible bucket. Egress is free.Learn more llmuxA sovereign AI gateway.One OpenAI-compatible API across local and remote models, on-box by default, with a sovereignty gate that blocks remote egress unless you opt in.Learn more lilmailBring your own mail, calendar, contacts.A database-free connector that brokers the Gmail, Outlook or IMAP account you already have — on your own box, never a hosted mailbox.Learn more SlipScanPersonal finance & accounting you own.Self-hosted, decentralised finance & accounting — transactions, receipts, a double-entry ledger and region-profile tax, on a plain SQLite file.Learn more SokoCommerce without a marketplace.A seller’s catalogue is a signed feed they publish; a buyer’s cart is CRDT state on their own devices; delivery is computed locally from rate cards.Learn more

Explore all products Open your OSHosted or self-hosted · every app is open source

Private AI

Your own AI,
on your own data.

Vulos doesn’t sell you a model or ship your mailbox to someone else’s GPU. It’s AI-friendly: the OS and every app expose clean, gated context and tool seams to whatever model you plug in. Run a local model on your box, or point it at a provider you trust — you decide, per request.

Bring your own model.llmux is a drop-in OpenAI-compatible gateway (or bring litellm). Ollama and llama.cpp on-box, or any provider — same API, your choice.
Compute stays on your box.GPU and AI inference run on the hardware you own or rent — Vulos Cloud hosts no compute for this. Managed, Vulos-provisioned GPU instances are on the roadmap but not offered yet.
Sovereign by default.The gateway only dials on-box, loopback backends by default. A remote provider is denied at dispatch — and never even contacted — unless you explicitly, and loggably, allow egress.
Your corpus, AI-accessible.On-box embeddings and retrieval make your mail, files and docs answerable — without a byte leaving the box you control.
Agency, not a black box.Every call is inspectable, every backend is yours to swap. No opaque model in the loop deciding what you can see.

How the sovereignty gate works

llmux · sovereignty gate

# local model — dialed on-box, no network
$ curl localhost:4000/v1/chat/completions
  -d '{"model":"ollama/llama3", ...}'
→ 200 OK  backend=loopback  egress=none

# remote provider — denied at dispatch
$ curl localhost:4000/v1/chat/completions
  -d '{"model":"openai/gpt-4o", ...}'
→ 403 sovereignty_error
  "remote backend blocked; set allow_egress:true"

# opt in, explicitly + logged
$ export LLMUX_ALLOW_EGRESS=true
→ 200 OK  backend=openai  egress=logged

The gateway layer

Convenience, not custody.

NAT traversal is hard. Firmware rollouts are hard. Recovering a locked-out box is hard. Ephor — the open-source broker — handles the parts your devices cannot do alone, and forwards encrypted bytes only. We run one you may use; bring your own or self-host it just as easily. The OS keeps running without it.

device · relay · device

How the OS manages itself

01Ephor, the brokerEphor forwards encrypted circuits between your devices — direct peer-to-peer first, relayed only as a fallback. Ciphertext, never payload. We host one; running your own is the same binary.optional
02Peering signallingRequest → approve handshake establishes signed server-to-server links. No open inboxes, no spam, no platform reading your messages.ed25519
03OTA updatesSigned firmware and app updates delivered over the air. Atomic rollback if a release misbehaves. Channels you control.signed
04SSH recoveryLocked out? An encrypted recovery channel restores access without a truck roll or factory reset. Off by default; opt in per device.opt-in
05Fleet managementOn Enterprise, manage a fleet centrally — policy, RBAC, audit logs, SSO — while your data stays in your own buckets.enterprise

The front door

Sign in once. Reach your box anywhere.

Your account is simply the email and password — or Google/Microsoft sign-in — you register with. That login is the always-up anchor: it proves who you are, then wakes and routes to your box. Identity and your data are decoupled, so the login server never holds the keys to your content.

How the front door works

01Email, OAuth, or passkeySign in with an email + password, link Google or Microsoft, or add a WebAuthn passkey. The login server verifies without ever holding the keys to your content — central identity, sovereign data.webauthn
02Identity ≠ your dataLogin proves who you are; it never grants access to your content. The durable copy of everything is yours, on your box — never in a shared central database.decoupled
03One codebase, your hardwareThe OS and apps are open source and run on your own box — no fork, no hosted variant. Your Vulos account and billing live centrally; your data lives on your box.self-host
04Sovereign by exitBring your own mail (Gmail/Outlook/IMAP) as a connector, and self-host the whole box any time. Every central service is replaceable and exportable — convenience, never lock-in.byo

Built differently

Three foundations you won't
find elsewhere.

A verifiable boot chain from image to running OS. One account across every instance. A sync model with no elected leader. Each is a deliberate architectural choice, not a feature flag.

01 · image-based OS

Signed boot chain, end to end.

Vulos ships as a squashfs image signed with an Ed25519 trust key baked in at build time. Whether you boot from USB or over PXE netboot, the kernel verifies the image before it runs anything. No unsigned firmware, no mutable rootfs, no post-install drift.

Boot architecture

02 · cross-instance identity

One account. Every instance.

Your Vulos account is an Ed25519 keypair, not a row in a shared directory. Sign in to home.vulos, studio.vulos, or pi-lab.vulos with the same identity — no OAuth dance, no delegated trust, no shared secret store between instances.

Identity model

03 · leaderless sync

No elected leader. No single point of failure.

Configuration and state sync across your instances uses a leaderless CRDT model: every node can write, all nodes converge, and none is authoritative. Partition tolerance is structural, not bolted on. Works offline; catches up when reconnected.

Sync internals

First-boot

From bare metal to a running OS in minutes.

Flash the image to a USB stick or point your BIOS at boot.vulos.org. Either way the trust key is baked in — the loader verifies the squashfs before the kernel hands off. No key-on-first-boot ceremony, no unsigned init phase.

USB boot. Flash to any drive, boot immediately. No installer — the whole OS is the image.
iPXE / netboot. PXE boot from boot.vulos.org. Machine picks up its signed image over the network.
Ed25519 chain. Each image is signed at build time. The baked trust key verifies before execution.
A/B update slots. OTA updates land in the idle slot. Atomic flip. Roll back if the new slot misbehaves.

First-boot guide

signed squashfs · trust key baked in

ed25519 · peer to peer · no middleman

Open peering

Instances talk directly. No inbox to spam.

Every Vulos instance has an Ed25519 identity and a vulos:<id> URI. A request-approve handshake establishes a signed server-to-server link. After that, your instances message, share files, and place WebRTC calls peer-to-peer — no relay unless NAT forces it.

Ed25519 identity. Cryptographic, portable, no platform dependency. Your key is the account.
Request → approve. Explicit handshake, no open inboxes, no spam. You control who reaches you.
P2P by default. WebRTC direct when possible. Relay as encrypted fallback when NAT requires.
No middleman. vulos.org does signalling only. It never relays your content unless you opt in.
Any relay can run this. Peer discovery and content-blind signalling are an open, key-addressed protocol — self-host a relay, or use ours. Standalone apps already peer this way with no Vulos OS involved.

How peering works

One person, many instances

Your home box and your laptop. Both yours, always in step.

Vulos isn't locked to a single machine. Run it on your always-on home box and your laptop, and they sync as peers — your apps, settings and workspace follow you. Reach either one from your phone, whether you're on the couch or across the world.

Reach from anywhere. Your phone dials your own instances directly — even behind NAT, with no port to open.
Peers, not a hierarchy. A home box and a laptop you own sync state as equals. No elected leader, no central account.
You hold every key. Instances authenticate over their own Ed25519 identities — the same peering model as messaging and calls.

Reach your box from anywhere

reach from anywhere · instances stay in sync as peers

No lock-in

Your exit costs nothing.

We mean that literally. Vulos is open source. The control plane is open to self-host. Your data lives in your bucket — Tigris, S3, MinIO, anything S3-compatible. Egress from Tigris is zero.

Open-source OS. Fork it, study it, ship a build that disagrees with ours. The repo is the spec.
Self-host the control plane. The same Go binary we run is the binary you can run. No private blobs.
BYO bucket. Your data never lands in our storage by default. Bring your own S3-compatible target.
Zero egress. Leave whenever. We do not bill for the privilege of getting your bytes back.
Portable identity. Export your Ed25519 keypair; the same Vulos ID survives the move.
Open protocol, not just open source. Peering and reachability are a published, key-addressed spec, not a private wire format — other implementers can and do build on the same substrate.

your key · your bucket · zero egress

vulos · from vula · isiZulu for open

The name is the contract.

Vulos takes its name from vula — isiZulu for open. Open source. Open identity. Open peering. Open exit. The cloud is a convenience we sell, not a moat we dig.

Every assumption that would lock you in — proprietary protocols, hostage data, walled directories, opaque pricing — is one we explicitly built against. Read the source. Verify the relay never decrypts. Move when you want to.

open peering · no middleman

By construction

Numbers you can verify in the repo.

Every limit and guarantee on this site is implemented in code, not promised in copy. The source is open — verify the math yourself.

$0Free tierNo credit card. Forever. Bounded by code.

25 GBFree relay / moFree EU relay every month. Direct-first, so most stay at $0.

E2ERelay payloadsWe forward ciphertext only. No decryption keys held.

BYOStorageYour bucket. Your bytes. Zero egress on exit.

Open source

Read every line. Star what you trust.

Vulos is built in the open across the vul-os organisation — the OS shell, every app in the suite, and the engines beneath them. Star counts are pulled live from GitHub. Only the control plane stays closed.

Built on the open ecosystem