I think it's a pretty clear line. Self hosted means you can run it locally in your home, using a saas platform or vps is just a convenience, not a requirement.
What about FOSS SaaS alternatives that are meant for team collab? Like Plane (Jira replacement). Does that have to be ran locally at home for it to be considered "self hosted"?
Self hosted means you host it yourself. I.e. you run the software. Running on your own home machine is definitely self-hosted. Hosting it on a VPS in some datacenter still is. Running it in a cloud platform somewhere is stretching it but I'd say that sill is. SaaS definitely is not self hosting even if the software is open source. The important part is that you're the one in control of the software.
I think a VPS is acceptable because otherwise you just can't let the broader internet talk to you, then. The internet's structured that way.
I hope AI will push infra, including good-enough AI itself, dirt cheap, so that everyone has "good enough" software for themselves. Tailscale is a game changer in this regard but only the first step.
A surprisingly large number do, at least in america. They're not guaranteed to be stable, i.e. you don't "own" the IP but in practice I've found that buying a relatively high tier internet plan tends to come with IPs that change less than once a year.
This is probably considerably less true in countries with a smaller ip to population ratio e.g. india.
It's an interesting example because I think it proves the opposite point. There are places, large dense cities, where most people live in tiny apartments, and if you're having a dinner party it's not going to be inside a house.
It's perfectly reasonable and understandable to say you're hosting the party even if you don't own the physical location (see also: weddings)
Yeah, I think we need to better define this term. To an extent people, call self-hosting using your own server in your own home. But I think using a VPS from hosting provider should also be an acceptable term.
That offers a lot of convenience that will keep self-hosting out of reach of a lot of people.
"Self-hosting is the practice of running a website or service on a home server instead of a web hosting service outside of the administrator's own control."
And then basically contradicts itself in the next paragraph:
"The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines."
In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has expanded over the years to include software that you're running on rented hardware in someone else's data center.
I think the opposite. 20 years ago self hosting almost always meant "in a data centre" but as home internet got better people started to think "or maybe in my basement" and now it's swung so far that a few think if it's not in your basement it's not self hosting
Self hosting wasn’t popular nomenclature back then, but it was common for people to host web and mail on at home on DSL or even dial-up (ISDN or even analog if you were bold) 20-30 years ago.
I only use Wikipedia occasionally but this is seriously the worst article I've ever seen. It switches the definition between "running on my own hardware" and "running it in the cloud" multiple times. It's been pointed out in a discussion about the article several months ago but nobody bothered to correct it.
Which is what has been done in pieces and argued about 10000 times to make this abomination. I guarantee there is someone watching this article 24/7 that will revert it the moment you update it
Having worked with cloud for almost 2 decades. The term self-hosted is indeed what you describe. The opposite is "managed services", e.g. services that are packaged by the vendor without the need to manage auxiliary needs like CPU, memory, disk, log rotation, etc.
There was a recent Show HN project that claimed to be 'self-hosted', and the installation included something like 6 service subscription dependencies. That's just a SaaS with more steps.
No, crazy would be owning the router and cables/satellites as well as producing your own power and having a manufacturing plant for hardware capable of running the software.
People have been running public websites off of the back of their ISPs since the 90s. I know a few today that are nothing but a Raspberry PI running Pocketbase.
It scales for the intended audience.
Self hosting doesn't mean you need to build the next AWS.
I would describe it as externally hosted yet managed specifically because someone else is most likely, whether they admit to it or not, recording some sort of logs on my service and data and that is a choice that I do not own or, in some cases, have access to.
Where is your own hardware located? A data center? Or maybe your place of residence? What if that location is compromised? Does that mean that physical ownership of the hardware is also not self hosted?
It is confusing, I agree. IMO we should have "self-running" and "self-hosting". Self-running if I provide the hardware, self-hosting if I manage it. Or swap the term, still not sure but there is a difference between you are the one maintaining it and where does it run.
I gave it a second thought and I think terms should be "self-managed" - you manage it either locally or in cloud and "self-hosted" you host it locally. Idk "self-contained" doesn't click with me, to be fair.
I would define hosting in the cloud as "self-hosting" because you perform the act of hosting that thing and thus have full control over it.
Yes it's not the same as hosting as your own hardware but I would argue that it accomplishes the same goals. The goal is to get other people out of your data. With a "service" the underlying company has every incentive to look at your data and use that to improve it's service, but when you host something yourself with a provider, it's in that providers best interest to never look at your data.
For me it all comes down to the goals of the people your are doing business with. With Cloudflare at least, their goal is to just upsell me on hosting equipment, they couldn't give a rats ass what I'm hosting on that hardware so long it's not illegal.
I think the reality is the goal posts are shifting on owning your own data, and apps. The idea that self-hosted is not on your _own_ hardware is crazy to me.
Is it a "goal post" shift or an insidious confusion? Clouds can be regulated, guard-railed, censored, spied on. Since your local computer is also just "cloud," it too can be regulated. This makes the mental-model change: what used to be "my personal thing" now becomes "a thing in the common network". That's different; it represents different values.
Ideally, yes, but not everyone is able to setup a complete server solution at home and also make the app publicly available. Also, there may be some benefits to hosting it on a service like Cloudflare.
I self-host a few projects on forgejo in my local homelab but the build deployed to Cloudflare or Heroku. The CI is on my homelab too.
I still have primary control over those projects in Heroku and Cloudflare though.
For all the people complaining this isn’t self hosted, it’s open source - it’s a relatively minor tweak to replace the AI calls to point to a local model server. Everything else runs locally via wrangler. It’s less than 20 minutes of work by hand, less than a minute to ask AI to do this.
It’s a weird complaint for people who supposedly like hacker culture.
Eh, it's the phrasing that's off-putting. Things that can be self hosted usually emphasize that first and top most, with a paid option being mentioned 2nd.
This is like saying you're self-hosting a game server because it's not hosted on the developers' server, but on the server of some other random third party you're paying to run it. No, self-hosting means you run it on hardware you own. Cloudflare is no stranger to redefining completely established terms for marketing reasons (see 'Cloudflare OS'), how about we stop buying it every time?
Yeah I was hoping to figure out what this thing's main distinction or value add was in these comments and it's almost nothing but people trying to be the smartest guy in the room by correcting the title's claim. I would never name it specifically lest I break the rules, but that's a pattern that drove me here from another site years ago, and it's sad to see it more common here.
Careful with Cloudflare's "free" AI tier if you use paid workers. I was never able to get an answer on why I was billed for their confusing neuron usage for stuff that should have been covered under their usage limits. Their customer support just ignored my ticket. Apparently it's a known issue that they don't give a shit based on discussions in their support Discord.
Not disagreeing because I don’t know anything about this particular situation, but I think if you look at any company’s support discord, you will find that they don’t give a shit because of the sample bias. People whose problems they solved. Don’t end up there.
yeah their billing system truly sucks. One month I was charged exorbitantly for Workers Container usage. There was absolutely zero way to monitor or track your usage until the invoice arrived.
Another non-obvious Cloudflare default, not billing but just as silent: if the "Browser Integrity Check" is enabled by default, your API behind Cloudflare will return a 403 error for requests with the `Python-urllib` User-Agent. However, you won't see this in your server logs (these events appear only under Cloudflare > Security > Events). From your perspective, it will look as though these clients simply aren't accessing the API. You can fix this by turning off "Browser Integrity Check" (under Security > Settings) or by creating a rule to exclude API paths from the check.
I'm not sure I understand why? If you hosted plex on a vps, you'd still call it self-hosted. I don't see why using (a) fargate or (b) lambda or (c) cf workers changes the calculus here?
Selfhost plex on any computer/vps/rented bare metal/ec2 is a docker compose away.
But I think changing aws fargate to google or azure alternative isn't a simple as that. It's already vendor locked because the business stake is to high to convert.
Calling it selfhosted but can only selfhost to Cloudflare unless doing heavy modification isn't selfhost.
Durable Objects are the coolest thing I have seen in a while. Code and its data locked away together, frozen when not in use, but ready to go in milliseconds when a request comes in. They are so damn useful.
A $34K bill with Durable Objects implies they somehow made 227 billion requests in a month. Sure, if that's the kind of traffic you're serving, your bill ought to be $34K! That's 87,000 per second!
Not sure what you're implying my position is, I said it's *risky* to use it (because there's no spending cap and a small mistake can result in life-changing bill for a hacker/solo dev).
Thanks for clarifying. Not sending a warning for a $34K bill is pretty terrible. My company runs a service that allows larger customers to run overages and all of our bad customer experiences have stemmed from surprise overages that we failed to warn them about. Over the years, we have learned to be less stupid about that!
It appears that even very large companies like Cloudflare may need to brush up on customer experience from time to time.
They had me at: "personal", which implies private when you call it self-hosted. But like this, it's nothing private, personal or really "self" at it. It's just hosted somewhere you decided, but not self and not home.
I find it troubling that people with no prior knowledge begin "self-hosting" their chatbots like this and put their secrets and personal stuff there, which this repo encourages. From a security-view it's a nightmare to advertise this.
This project falls foul of the same issues as almost every one of these personal assistants: there's no indication that it works.
Each part of this is very easy to implement, even if writing the code by hand. A chat interface, plus memories, plus semantic search, a little database, some embeddings, cron triggers. It's all trivial to implement... unless you want it to work, and more than that, if you want to know for sure that it works.
Because the harness is key, the prompting is key, the exact wording of the skills matters, the way the memories work, the embeddings used, all of these have influence over how well the system actually performs at being a personal assistant.
I've plugged together the dozen libraries necessary to do this sort of thing, and then it sorta works and sometimes doesn't. I realised that the whole problem is actually one of evaluation. If you don't have evals that say that it recalls memories with a certain performance, if you don't have evals that say that it actually completes tasks some percentage of the time, then you don't know if it actually works.
I've learnt not to bother investing my time in anything like this unless there's evidence that it actually works beyond "on my machine" from the devs.
This is a bit of a paradox. Indication that it works requires some kind of proof. Proof is mostly a byproduct of people trying things. If the rule is “don't try it until it’s proven,” and proof requires people trying it, then any new innovation would be in a little bit of a pickle.
Your worldview requires other enterprising people to try new things, write about them, find the rough edges, help to iterate and improve, and then surface their findings in such a way that it can meet the bar of "working".
Self hosted definitely does not need to mean you use your own hardware
If I operate forgejo on a hetzner instance I a self hosting my own forge despite it not being my hardware
Whoever the author of this repo is - they have made the personal agent runtime so that it can be self hosted. The runtime itself is the thing that you can self host.
For those questioning (rightly) the "self-hosted" description, I suspect its a poorly-worded attempt to clarify there is no third-party requirement (eg. the repo is not cloudflare-owned) beyond your own cloudflare account.
Sometimes these "open source" services are a bit misleading as there is a coupling to the org providing them; I think the OP here just means there's nothing extra needed beyond whatever cloudflare commitment you already have.
"Hosted" is the term that describes an application running on someone else's hardware. As opposed to "self-hosted" which describes an application running on my own hardware. There's no need to invent new terms, just use the existing ones properly and this will prevent any confusion.
To test this, I added a memory entry for "I am a vegetarian" and then opened a chat asking "give me some dinner ideas". It gave me options for chicken and salmon, among other things.
I put together a proposal to add semantic functionality.
Claude suggested the same approach for something very similar I asked and ended up deploying and using.
Quite useful and snappy architecture (never used workers or durable objects).
Definitely not self-hosted but whatever, I think you got the msg from all other comments.
I built it without having a chatbot interface cause I don't see much of the point, like I didn't see the improvement in usefulness 5 years ago re "natural language" task creation a la todoist.
Did a side project on Workers and the self host test for me was whether I could run it off Cloudflare at all. Durable Objects and KV bindings meant no, so it was really just deploy it yourself.
This is great. If this was available a few years ago, I would have looked at this and similar projects to see if I should base my personal use service on. Why send your sometimes relatively private info elsewhere to be profiled? Why not have software that solves for your needs?
As is, I have already been running my own service (with no intent to open source) for years where I decide features, tools and UX that suits me. My UX is substantially different from these chat boxes. It is also multi-user by design. It still needs time investment but the tradeoff is worth for me. Over time, I expect this threshold to keep getting lower and increasing percentage of folks to cross it.
Generally, as that happens with the cost and time to build software trending lower, I think it will be interesting to watch how this dynamic evolves. For example, is it possible "personal OS" systems could emerge that solve the users' needs? I have created many smallish solutions for my needs recently, but they aren't unified in any way and I personally don't have a desire to be that [human] OS.
We manage the app and updates, while your backend and data live in your own Cloudflare account, so it's private. It's free, and we're currently building out more apps.
I'm pretty excited by self hosted agents or maybe just self hosted MCPs to allow remote agents like Dots or Muse gated access to your data. Amazon blocks Muse/Dots but they can't block every DO or Cloudflare egress IP.
Hi HN! I built Talorys, an open-source personal AI agent that runs entirely in your own Cloudflare account.
The idea came from wanting a personal AI assistant that I could own and control, without paying a monthly subscription or relying on someone else's hosted service.
Talorys uses Cloudflare Workers, Workers AI, Durable Objects, and Pages to provide:
AI chat with persistent memory and conversation history
Task, note, and project management
Scheduled reminders and recurring automations
A responsive web interface accessible from any device
Password-protected access with no signup or external accounts
One-command deployment: npx create-talorys@latest
Everything runs in your Cloudflare account. Your data stays under your control, and there's no telemetry or third-party backend operated by me.
It's designed to work within Cloudflare's free-tier limits for personal use. You don't need to manage a VPS, database server, or Docker containers.
The biggest challenge was making deployment simple enough that someone could set up their own AI assistant without manually configuring Cloudflare services.
The project is still early, and I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially on the architecture, security, and what would make a self-hosted personal AI agent genuinely useful.
> without paying a monthly subscription or relying on someone else's hosted service.
But you are hosting it on Cloudflare? There is always a cost when running on someone else's platform that advertises itself as 'free-tier' and it can change at any moment.
I'm torn in situations like these, because OP is clearly furthering societal trends that are objectively harmful by watering down terminology like this.
It is snark, but it is immune-response snark and not petty snark.
One shouldn't crush them for it, as it might be driven by naivety, but soft politeness alone doesn't steer us away from harmful ideas.
Social friction caused by feeling stupid for saying something is an important tool if wielded with responsibility and not just swung for ego.
Then explain what the problem is, in clear language. Otherwise the person reading your response is going to take away only the message that you're a bit of an arse, and have no actual point to make.
And I've swapped Workers AI out of plenty of the example apps in the CloudFlare/agents repo on GitHub. I've gotten it working against a local whisperfile binary in like 5 minutes.
agents package is very easy to disentangle from CloudFlare once you've sorted celld, which itself is just a single binary to run
This is a neat implementation, regardless of the argument over how it is hosted! There are a number of other systems along the same general lines, but for me the sticking point is that there is no good implementation equivalent to the Alexa devices scattered around my home (and RV!) that allow me to interact via speech. I'm working on one of those now in my copious spare time. (Yes, there are a bunch of rPi projects. Their rates of errors are unacceptably high.)
This was very easy to set up and play around with.
Giving it the ability to access webpages / do searches would be nice!
It seems like the free 10000 "neurons" would cover light daily usage, like maybe 20-30 minutes of back and forth. I spent 500 in a few minutes of chatting until I realized the tasks I had in mind aren't possible.
How often are you running out of gas, so to speak?
This might sound kinda crazy, but I define “self-hosted” as something that I host myself.
Where do you draw the line? Some SaaS acceptable? VPS? Bare metal? Or your own server in your own home?
IMO physical hardware in your own material possession, so only the last of your examples.
I think it's a pretty clear line. Self hosted means you can run it locally in your home, using a saas platform or vps is just a convenience, not a requirement.
What about FOSS SaaS alternatives that are meant for team collab? Like Plane (Jira replacement). Does that have to be ran locally at home for it to be considered "self hosted"?
Self hosted means you host it yourself. I.e. you run the software. Running on your own home machine is definitely self-hosted. Hosting it on a VPS in some datacenter still is. Running it in a cloud platform somewhere is stretching it but I'd say that sill is. SaaS definitely is not self hosting even if the software is open source. The important part is that you're the one in control of the software.
If you run Plane on your hardware, then it is self-hosted.
I think a VPS is acceptable because otherwise you just can't let the broader internet talk to you, then. The internet's structured that way.
I hope AI will push infra, including good-enough AI itself, dirt cheap, so that everyone has "good enough" software for themselves. Tailscale is a game changer in this regard but only the first step.
I don't have a VPS, I have a mini server in my house. I run bunch of publicly available services on it.
I might be stupid but I thought normal consumer internet didn't expose stable IP addresses?
never mind, ddns. huh.
Or cloudflare tunnels are even more effective for this
A surprisingly large number do, at least in america. They're not guaranteed to be stable, i.e. you don't "own" the IP but in practice I've found that buying a relatively high tier internet plan tends to come with IPs that change less than once a year.
This is probably considerably less true in countries with a smaller ip to population ratio e.g. india.
you have to read between the lines.
the complaint is the communication, not the literal words. because the title conflicts with itself, it causes confusion.
for example, saying, "come join us. I'm hosting a dinner party. It's at this restaurant," would be similar.
It's an interesting example because I think it proves the opposite point. There are places, large dense cities, where most people live in tiny apartments, and if you're having a dinner party it's not going to be inside a house.
It's perfectly reasonable and understandable to say you're hosting the party even if you don't own the physical location (see also: weddings)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting_(network)
You should have the option to host it at home. Then you may choose to host in a vps. Must be vendor agnostic.
Agreed, in my mind it’s where the developer can’t unilaterally change your installation.
I think the line is obvious... If you can't unplug it, you're not self-hosting.
I would personally draw the line a the data centres. If your infrastructure involves data centres, this is not self hosting. In my opinion.
Yeah, I think we need to better define this term. To an extent people, call self-hosting using your own server in your own home. But I think using a VPS from hosting provider should also be an acceptable term. That offers a lot of convenience that will keep self-hosting out of reach of a lot of people.
To me, "self-hosted" means, either I use a rented hardware or I use a purchased hardware.
If the software can be switched to a rented or purchased hardware (I do not want Cloudflare's offering) then it is "self-host-able" IMO.
I think there are open source Cloudflare alternative hosting software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting_(network)
That is a very poorly-written Wikipedia article.
The first sentence states:
"Self-hosting is the practice of running a website or service on a home server instead of a web hosting service outside of the administrator's own control."
And then basically contradicts itself in the next paragraph:
"The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines."
In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has expanded over the years to include software that you're running on rented hardware in someone else's data center.
I think the opposite. 20 years ago self hosting almost always meant "in a data centre" but as home internet got better people started to think "or maybe in my basement" and now it's swung so far that a few think if it's not in your basement it's not self hosting
Self hosting wasn’t popular nomenclature back then, but it was common for people to host web and mail on at home on DSL or even dial-up (ISDN or even analog if you were bold) 20-30 years ago.
I only use Wikipedia occasionally but this is seriously the worst article I've ever seen. It switches the definition between "running on my own hardware" and "running it in the cloud" multiple times. It's been pointed out in a discussion about the article several months ago but nobody bothered to correct it.
You can correct it
Which is what has been done in pieces and argued about 10000 times to make this abomination. I guarantee there is someone watching this article 24/7 that will revert it the moment you update it
If you edit it anonymously now, then it is likely someone will revert it.
Having worked with cloud for almost 2 decades. The term self-hosted is indeed what you describe. The opposite is "managed services", e.g. services that are packaged by the vendor without the need to manage auxiliary needs like CPU, memory, disk, log rotation, etc.
I would call that self configured, cloud hosted.
Self-hosted but not self-owned.
Responsible for hosting…
There was a recent Show HN project that claimed to be 'self-hosted', and the installation included something like 6 service subscription dependencies. That's just a SaaS with more steps.
No, crazy would be owning the router and cables/satellites as well as producing your own power and having a manufacturing plant for hardware capable of running the software.
I think op is thinking about local.
So am I
Is this an Elon reference?
To make an apple pie from scratch, one must first create the universe?
People have been running public websites off of the back of their ISPs since the 90s. I know a few today that are nothing but a Raspberry PI running Pocketbase.
It scales for the intended audience.
Self hosting doesn't mean you need to build the next AWS.
I agree.
I would describe it as externally hosted yet managed specifically because someone else is most likely, whether they admit to it or not, recording some sort of logs on my service and data and that is a choice that I do not own or, in some cases, have access to.
Yourself? In your brain?
No, on your hardware.
If someone else can fat finger a delete, it’s not self hosted.
So if someone could physically gain access to your server/computer and press "delete" –– would that mean your service is not self-hosted?
Where is your own hardware located? A data center? Or maybe your place of residence? What if that location is compromised? Does that mean that physical ownership of the hardware is also not self hosted?
It is confusing, I agree. IMO we should have "self-running" and "self-hosting". Self-running if I provide the hardware, self-hosting if I manage it. Or swap the term, still not sure but there is a difference between you are the one maintaining it and where does it run.
“Self contained”? Like a container, run on Cloudflare, run locally, run anywhere (if supported by the container and required underlying primitives).
I gave it a second thought and I think terms should be "self-managed" - you manage it either locally or in cloud and "self-hosted" you host it locally. Idk "self-contained" doesn't click with me, to be fair.
Self-hosting is when you install and run something for yourself.
Whether you use the cloud, or a vps, or a dedicated bare metal server, or your own equipment at home is all self hosting.
I would define hosting in the cloud as "self-hosting" because you perform the act of hosting that thing and thus have full control over it.
Yes it's not the same as hosting as your own hardware but I would argue that it accomplishes the same goals. The goal is to get other people out of your data. With a "service" the underlying company has every incentive to look at your data and use that to improve it's service, but when you host something yourself with a provider, it's in that providers best interest to never look at your data.
For me it all comes down to the goals of the people your are doing business with. With Cloudflare at least, their goal is to just upsell me on hosting equipment, they couldn't give a rats ass what I'm hosting on that hardware so long it's not illegal.
Can “on-prem” solve this debate?
You can self-host on-prem or in the cloud.
This makes sense. You can self-host on-prem or host in the cloud. Easy and intuitive.
Can we sort out DSL as a group? ;)
Unfortunately for a lot of folks “on-prem” means “in our tenant”
I think the reality is the goal posts are shifting on owning your own data, and apps. The idea that self-hosted is not on your _own_ hardware is crazy to me.
Is it a "goal post" shift or an insidious confusion? Clouds can be regulated, guard-railed, censored, spied on. Since your local computer is also just "cloud," it too can be regulated. This makes the mental-model change: what used to be "my personal thing" now becomes "a thing in the common network". That's different; it represents different values.
All he had to do was to title it properly: 'An AI agent hosted on Cloudflare's free tier'.
honestly the fact that Cloudflare pays for infra instead of you is even more impressive ngl
As impressive as Facebook paying for your social media experience.
Should be “self managed.”
(You can manage it, the resources, replace the software, etc.)
buy a few shares of NET - you are partial owner now - problem solved :)
This is AI though man - we need to redefine all phrases, such as “open source” as well.
Yeah this to me is more self-rented.
Ideally, yes, but not everyone is able to setup a complete server solution at home and also make the app publicly available. Also, there may be some benefits to hosting it on a service like Cloudflare.
I self-host a few projects on forgejo in my local homelab but the build deployed to Cloudflare or Heroku. The CI is on my homelab too.
I still have primary control over those projects in Heroku and Cloudflare though.
For all the people complaining this isn’t self hosted, it’s open source - it’s a relatively minor tweak to replace the AI calls to point to a local model server. Everything else runs locally via wrangler. It’s less than 20 minutes of work by hand, less than a minute to ask AI to do this.
It’s a weird complaint for people who supposedly like hacker culture.
Eh, it's the phrasing that's off-putting. Things that can be self hosted usually emphasize that first and top most, with a paid option being mentioned 2nd.
Yeah completely agree. Jeez someone made something cool.
It’s self hosted as in not by an ai provider. This is obvious.
Sure it’s set up to run on some infrastructure but just tweak it if you want to and stop complaining.
But it’s not self hosted like in self hosted.
Why add a false feature claim if the true features are cool enough?
Because the Cloudflare hosting is just a choice. You can change it easily.
The self hosted part is about the ai provider.
Again. This is obvious.
This is like saying you're self-hosting a game server because it's not hosted on the developers' server, but on the server of some other random third party you're paying to run it. No, self-hosting means you run it on hardware you own. Cloudflare is no stranger to redefining completely established terms for marketing reasons (see 'Cloudflare OS'), how about we stop buying it every time?
IME Self-hosting means you're doing a specific thing in a general-purpose place. As opposed to paying for a specific-purpose place.
So like, running bitwarden on a VPS counts as self-hosting even if the VPS isn't physically in your home.
And installing postgres or redis on the VPS counts as self-hosting as opposed to paying for a dedicated database.
So does installing your own web server. Running your own ACME client for certificates. Etc.
It doesn't require hardware you own, the idea of self-hosting includes software you control.
Here my program with feature A, ok without feature A, but you can add it with 20 min of work.
Are we now adding all possible features to the description just because they can be added by hand or LLM?
And since when is hacker culture about false advertising
Who said they like hacker culture in 2026?
Then why are you on a website for hacker news?
You're the kind of hacker that self-hosts email on gmail.com
Thank you. Looking for info on the OP and all I get is a self hosted argument. HN gets so pedantic sometimes.
Yeah I was hoping to figure out what this thing's main distinction or value add was in these comments and it's almost nothing but people trying to be the smartest guy in the room by correcting the title's claim. I would never name it specifically lest I break the rules, but that's a pattern that drove me here from another site years ago, and it's sad to see it more common here.
Careful with Cloudflare's "free" AI tier if you use paid workers. I was never able to get an answer on why I was billed for their confusing neuron usage for stuff that should have been covered under their usage limits. Their customer support just ignored my ticket. Apparently it's a known issue that they don't give a shit based on discussions in their support Discord.
I got my bill reversed after having an AI agent pester them long enough
was the ai agent running on their free tier
Not disagreeing because I don’t know anything about this particular situation, but I think if you look at any company’s support discord, you will find that they don’t give a shit because of the sample bias. People whose problems they solved. Don’t end up there.
Only if the support discord isn't actually for support and just for venting, which seems to be the case for Cloudflare's.
Discord is a much better app for venting than support.
You should put anything like this on a privacy.com card with a monthly limit.
yeah their billing system truly sucks. One month I was charged exorbitantly for Workers Container usage. There was absolutely zero way to monitor or track your usage until the invoice arrived.
You can prevent it by spend limit rule or unified billing.
Another non-obvious Cloudflare default, not billing but just as silent: if the "Browser Integrity Check" is enabled by default, your API behind Cloudflare will return a 403 error for requests with the `Python-urllib` User-Agent. However, you won't see this in your server logs (these events appear only under Cloudflare > Security > Events). From your perspective, it will look as though these clients simply aren't accessing the API. You can fix this by turning off "Browser Integrity Check" (under Security > Settings) or by creating a rule to exclude API paths from the check.
I'm not sure I understand the use-case or target audience for this. Selfhosted on cloudflare is a great oxymoron though.
Unless you use cloudflare tunnel to host it
I'm not sure I understand why? If you hosted plex on a vps, you'd still call it self-hosted. I don't see why using (a) fargate or (b) lambda or (c) cf workers changes the calculus here?
Selfhost plex on any computer/vps/rented bare metal/ec2 is a docker compose away.
But I think changing aws fargate to google or azure alternative isn't a simple as that. It's already vendor locked because the business stake is to high to convert.
Calling it selfhosted but can only selfhost to Cloudflare unless doing heavy modification isn't selfhost.
Durable Objects are the coolest thing I have seen in a while. Code and its data locked away together, frozen when not in use, but ready to go in milliseconds when a request comes in. They are so damn useful.
While Durable Objects are a different story, data coupled with code brings up awful memories of MacOS FileMaker
I've read yesterday how someone's DO racked $34k bill, someone's else's $17k.
They're pretty cool indeed, just pretty risky.
A $34K bill with Durable Objects implies they somehow made 227 billion requests in a month. Sure, if that's the kind of traffic you're serving, your bill ought to be $34K! That's 87,000 per second!
That was a bug in monitoring, afair, and no way to set the hard ceiling for the usage, no warning.
Not a FX exchange level of traffic. There was no traffic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787042
Not sure what you're implying my position is, I said it's *risky* to use it (because there's no spending cap and a small mistake can result in life-changing bill for a hacker/solo dev).
https://x.com/jpschroeder/status/2086144942657712500
There was more.
Thanks for clarifying. Not sending a warning for a $34K bill is pretty terrible. My company runs a service that allows larger customers to run overages and all of our bad customer experiences have stemmed from surprise overages that we failed to warn them about. Over the years, we have learned to be less stupid about that!
It appears that even very large companies like Cloudflare may need to brush up on customer experience from time to time.
They had me at: "personal", which implies private when you call it self-hosted. But like this, it's nothing private, personal or really "self" at it. It's just hosted somewhere you decided, but not self and not home.
I find it troubling that people with no prior knowledge begin "self-hosting" their chatbots like this and put their secrets and personal stuff there, which this repo encourages. From a security-view it's a nightmare to advertise this.
This project falls foul of the same issues as almost every one of these personal assistants: there's no indication that it works.
Each part of this is very easy to implement, even if writing the code by hand. A chat interface, plus memories, plus semantic search, a little database, some embeddings, cron triggers. It's all trivial to implement... unless you want it to work, and more than that, if you want to know for sure that it works.
Because the harness is key, the prompting is key, the exact wording of the skills matters, the way the memories work, the embeddings used, all of these have influence over how well the system actually performs at being a personal assistant.
I've plugged together the dozen libraries necessary to do this sort of thing, and then it sorta works and sometimes doesn't. I realised that the whole problem is actually one of evaluation. If you don't have evals that say that it recalls memories with a certain performance, if you don't have evals that say that it actually completes tasks some percentage of the time, then you don't know if it actually works.
I've learnt not to bother investing my time in anything like this unless there's evidence that it actually works beyond "on my machine" from the devs.
This is a bit of a paradox. Indication that it works requires some kind of proof. Proof is mostly a byproduct of people trying things. If the rule is “don't try it until it’s proven,” and proof requires people trying it, then any new innovation would be in a little bit of a pickle.
Your worldview requires other enterprising people to try new things, write about them, find the rough edges, help to iterate and improve, and then surface their findings in such a way that it can meet the bar of "working".
This is the first I’m hearing about Cloudflare’s worker AI product. I see they provide 10,000 neurons a day on the free tier. What on earth is that?
10k neuron is roughly 0.11 USD for the usage https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/platform/pricin...
Looks like it's about 4M input tokens or 0.5M output tokens with their cheapest model `@cf/meta/llama-3.2-1b-instruct`
With `@cf/qwen/qwen3.8-27b` it's 240K input tokens and 34,000 output tokens
A fantasy currency like in shitty mobile games to obfuscate the actual amount of money spent.
Please don't use the word "self-hosted" if it's not hosted on your hardware. This thing depends entirely on cloudflares services and "generosity".
Self hosted definitely does not need to mean you use your own hardware
If I operate forgejo on a hetzner instance I a self hosting my own forge despite it not being my hardware
Whoever the author of this repo is - they have made the personal agent runtime so that it can be self hosted. The runtime itself is the thing that you can self host.
For those questioning (rightly) the "self-hosted" description, I suspect its a poorly-worded attempt to clarify there is no third-party requirement (eg. the repo is not cloudflare-owned) beyond your own cloudflare account.
Sometimes these "open source" services are a bit misleading as there is a coupling to the org providing them; I think the OP here just means there's nothing extra needed beyond whatever cloudflare commitment you already have.
"Self-managed" seems the better term.
"Hosted" is the term that describes an application running on someone else's hardware. As opposed to "self-hosted" which describes an application running on my own hardware. There's no need to invent new terms, just use the existing ones properly and this will prevent any confusion.
There's nothing self-hosted about relying on Cloudflare for _literally_ everything.
Sure, but this is a free thing for some to play around with. Nothing literal, reliant or histrionic about it. :)
Call it "A free personal AI agent" if "free" is what you care about, self-hosted doesn't imply free nor vice-versa.
Agreed. Better yet, call it "free (as in beer)" to distinguish from the other meaning of free when talking about software :-)
Cool idea!
It needs semantic recall though.
To test this, I added a memory entry for "I am a vegetarian" and then opened a chat asking "give me some dinner ideas". It gave me options for chicken and salmon, among other things.
I put together a proposal to add semantic functionality.
https://github.com/rociiu/talorys/issues/2
Couldn’t seem to load the screen shot? GitHub being weird https://github.com/rociiu/talorys/blob/main/docs/screenshots...
Claude suggested the same approach for something very similar I asked and ended up deploying and using. Quite useful and snappy architecture (never used workers or durable objects). Definitely not self-hosted but whatever, I think you got the msg from all other comments.
I built it without having a chatbot interface cause I don't see much of the point, like I didn't see the improvement in usefulness 5 years ago re "natural language" task creation a la todoist.
Did a side project on Workers and the self host test for me was whether I could run it off Cloudflare at all. Durable Objects and KV bindings meant no, so it was really just deploy it yourself.
This is great. If this was available a few years ago, I would have looked at this and similar projects to see if I should base my personal use service on. Why send your sometimes relatively private info elsewhere to be profiled? Why not have software that solves for your needs?
As is, I have already been running my own service (with no intent to open source) for years where I decide features, tools and UX that suits me. My UX is substantially different from these chat boxes. It is also multi-user by design. It still needs time investment but the tradeoff is worth for me. Over time, I expect this threshold to keep getting lower and increasing percentage of folks to cross it.
Generally, as that happens with the cost and time to build software trending lower, I think it will be interesting to watch how this dynamic evolves. For example, is it possible "personal OS" systems could emerge that solve the users' needs? I have created many smallish solutions for my needs recently, but they aren't unified in any way and I personally don't have a desire to be that [human] OS.
We built a similar concept over at Ayoh.dev
We manage the app and updates, while your backend and data live in your own Cloudflare account, so it's private. It's free, and we're currently building out more apps.
I'm pretty excited by self hosted agents or maybe just self hosted MCPs to allow remote agents like Dots or Muse gated access to your data. Amazon blocks Muse/Dots but they can't block every DO or Cloudflare egress IP.
In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has broadened
all of the people disagreeing in this thread are evidence to the contrary
Used to be broader. Some people wish to narrow it
Interesting topic for the coming months
> Your personal AI agent. Your own cloud.
Sorry, I don't own any cloud.
self-hosted, cloudflare, free == annoying captcha, in the cloud, fingerprinting, MITM, you sold all your traffic in plaintext to the bigtech blob.
Cloudflare worker AI is verrrrry slow for user interactive use cases. Fine for background jobs or evals.
Interesting subject
Neat. Gonna have to give this a try.
Isn't it a free tier until they decide you should start paying or leave?
FYI. Give Claude a cf key. Done. All work is now a prompt.
Hi HN! I built Talorys, an open-source personal AI agent that runs entirely in your own Cloudflare account.
The idea came from wanting a personal AI assistant that I could own and control, without paying a monthly subscription or relying on someone else's hosted service.
Talorys uses Cloudflare Workers, Workers AI, Durable Objects, and Pages to provide:
AI chat with persistent memory and conversation history Task, note, and project management Scheduled reminders and recurring automations A responsive web interface accessible from any device Password-protected access with no signup or external accounts One-command deployment: npx create-talorys@latest Everything runs in your Cloudflare account. Your data stays under your control, and there's no telemetry or third-party backend operated by me.
It's designed to work within Cloudflare's free-tier limits for personal use. You don't need to manage a VPS, database server, or Docker containers.
The biggest challenge was making deployment simple enough that someone could set up their own AI assistant without manually configuring Cloudflare services.
The project is still early, and I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially on the architecture, security, and what would make a self-hosted personal AI agent genuinely useful.
GitHub: https://github.com/rociiu/talorys
It's MIT licensed. Contributions and suggestions are welcome!
This is a neat idea, but I wouldn’t say you aren’t relying on someone else's hosted service. Cloudflare isn’t a public utility quite yet.
So instead of relying on someone's hosted service, this is relying on someone's 4 hosted services?
> without paying a monthly subscription or relying on someone else's hosted service.
But you are hosting it on Cloudflare? There is always a cost when running on someone else's platform that advertises itself as 'free-tier' and it can change at any moment.
That’s great! Where do I download cloudflare?
from the internet
Can't. Clouflare is MitM-ing large parts of the internet and denying service with their shitty captachas.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm torn in situations like these, because OP is clearly furthering societal trends that are objectively harmful by watering down terminology like this.
It is snark, but it is immune-response snark and not petty snark.
One shouldn't crush them for it, as it might be driven by naivety, but soft politeness alone doesn't steer us away from harmful ideas.
Social friction caused by feeling stupid for saying something is an important tool if wielded with responsibility and not just swung for ego.
Then explain what the problem is, in clear language. Otherwise the person reading your response is going to take away only the message that you're a bit of an arse, and have no actual point to make.
Not in this tone, no.
(Besides, it is 100% obvious from context and from the many other comments, so bulldozer driving sea lions get out)
Rebuild it with swarm of agents in rust
Except for Workers AI, I don't see any reason this wouldn't run on celld.
And I've swapped Workers AI out of plenty of the example apps in the CloudFlare/agents repo on GitHub. I've gotten it working against a local whisperfile binary in like 5 minutes.
agents package is very easy to disentangle from CloudFlare once you've sorted celld, which itself is just a single binary to run
A suggestion: write the reader yourself next time you’re launching a product/project. It’s painful to always be reading this Claudeish prose.
This is a neat implementation, regardless of the argument over how it is hosted! There are a number of other systems along the same general lines, but for me the sticking point is that there is no good implementation equivalent to the Alexa devices scattered around my home (and RV!) that allow me to interact via speech. I'm working on one of those now in my copious spare time. (Yes, there are a bunch of rPi projects. Their rates of errors are unacceptably high.)
This was very easy to set up and play around with.
Giving it the ability to access webpages / do searches would be nice!
It seems like the free 10000 "neurons" would cover light daily usage, like maybe 20-30 minutes of back and forth. I spent 500 in a few minutes of chatting until I realized the tasks I had in mind aren't possible.
How often are you running out of gas, so to speak?