Are Consumers Worried Enough to Buy a Personal Computer Server?

> What does that $99/year even used for that can't be run on the device itself? For the public gateway service in case your ISP bans (mail) servers on their network.

I would guess it's to make the device maintenance sustainable, providing a revenue stream to the company to keep providing support and system/security updates for an extended period of time.

I was intrigued by this device when I first read about it. This should be on the "alternative path" to MRR focused digital landlords, but instead it's just the same damn thing...? The rent seeking in this industry is disgusting.

Hi there - co-founder and CEO of Helm here. It covers domain registrations, DNS records, the security gateway with a static IP that works around residential ISP limitations and storage for offsite encrypted backups. None of these would be able to run on the device itself.

Seconded. Why can’t I just run helm on an old rig?

Good question - tightly integrated hardware based security. To support secure boot, full disk encryption and ensure keys are well protected, we utilize a security chip in the SoC. This protects your data in the event of theft.

Quite a bit more transparency is coming - we will be publishing a series of posts going into more detail of how this works. In addition, we will be open sourcing quite a bit.