18 ms·

Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

242 points by philips 5y ago

Saris 5y ago
$99 a year for 128GB of backup space is really high, but I suppose it's partially paying for the OS updates or something like that? I also wonder about name confusion with Helm the Kubernetes management system.. That said it looks like a nice setup, the hardware price is pretty reasonable for a completed product, and the website is trying to keep things simple.
- rodolphoarruda 5y ago
  And I wonder how this could work for the 1TB version. Would it compress things locally so they could fit into the available 128GB space?
  - Saris 5y ago
    Unless it's really specific content that wouldn't even be possible, I assume you just don't get your stuff backed up lol
  - gsreenivas 5y ago
    Hi there - Helm co-founder/CEO here. We will have additional tiers of subscription for customers to back up additional data with us. Everything is locally compressed before uploading and all backups are encrypted with keys only customers have.
    - Saris 5y ago
      Is it not on the site maybe? So far I haven't been able to find anything but the 128GB option.
      - gsreenivas 5y ago
        We haven't launched these tiers yet - that's why
        phone8675309 5y ago
        Why would you allow customers to purchase hardware with storage capacity that you can’t fully support on the back-end yet?
        philderbeast 5y ago
        your comments just keep getting better "we have additional teirs..... but we havent launched them yet" so you DON'T in fact have addtional teirs since I can't buy them, resulting in only 128gig of cloud backup being availble regardless of what hardware I buy. Not to mention this "cloud backup" takes my files back out of my control and hands them over to big tech (apparently encrypted, but from your other comments there is no way to verify that since there is no option for the user to access the device)
- shoo 5y ago
  maybe it's also partly to deal with the ongoing costs of customer support.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  For name confusion, I thought of helm the famous emacs package.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Or famous freeware synthesizer by Matt Tytel.
    - theblazehen 5y ago
      Or the kubernetes package manager
      - comprev 5y ago
        This was my first thought too. Having the same name as the most popular package manager for the most popular container orchestrator seems unwise.
satyanash 5y ago
Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.
- remram 5y ago
  It seems that Nextcloud, Postfix, and Strongswan are copyleft. > You may obtain the complete corresponding source code from us for a period of three years after our last shipment of this product by sending a money order or check for $5 to: <snailmail address> Without being illegal this is rather hostile. But then again they are selling subscriptions to open-source software so I expected something shady.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an online accessible version of it. Charging a small amount for a copy of the source is fine. And I will go so far as to say that making demands about access to the source code in a manner beyond what the GPL requires, is actually hurting the adoption of GPL software, not helping it. Why should a company base their work on GPL licensed software if they are going to meet pushback even when they are complying with the letter of the GPL? They might just build something different all together, and with no open source at all. And where does that leave us? Definitely in a worse place.
    - chrisfosterelli 5y ago
      Hypothetically, could one not use this to get around GPL by modifying GPL software and agreeing to make the changes available to others but only at a ridiculous price?
kderbyma 5y ago
working on an open source version of these. called the Calliope Muse+ - it should be available for pre-order soon. if you want a non-subscription option
- philips 5y ago
  Do you have a link?
71a54xd 5y ago
No thanks, this wreaks of a monthly subscription I don't want that would result in unsupported buggy "hardware" in 10 years guaranteed. I'll keep my ZFS server with a text file reminding me how I configured it for now (since I usually forget after a few months)!
- MonadIsPronad 5y ago
  "reeks" was the word you wanted, I think
  - 71a54xd 5y ago
    Thank you kind stranger ;)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
digitalsushi 5y ago
If I could reliably transfer my gmail legacy freebie grandfather thing account without it taking 7 to 11 days of API rate limited transfer at 100% luck, I would get my email out of there. Alas.
- eps 5y ago
  If it's a one-time thing, then even it taking weeks is quite acceptable.
- h4waii 5y ago
  Fire up gyb [0] now, and by the time this (or whatever solution you want) is ready for an import, you'll be done. 0. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
  - philips 5y ago
    Why this and not takeout?
- breakingcups 5y ago
  Would Google Takeout not suffice in this, maybe after some post-processing?
- gsreenivas 5y ago
  A workaround is to set up a desktop email client - allow it to fully sync, then use the desktop email client to export your email and import to another account. Google rate limiting and restricting access to your own data is pretty awful. They are similarly terrible about OAuth permissions for 3rd parties - some companies are allowed to export data on behalf of customers while others are not.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Doing this via an email client is going to be really slow. Use something like fetchmail.
flixic 5y ago
It seems they are targeting "normal" people (to whom word "dockerized" sounds like a misspelling of something happening in a port). Mixing "normal" people and self-hosted email is a recipe for very bad experience.
- ttul 5y ago
  I suppose this is their gamble: can they make something that is so easy to use, even a normal person will be happy with it. That being said, how many “normal” people are really so concerned about email security that they don’t trust one of the big clouds?
  - Talanes 5y ago
    They exist, if you don't consider Protonmail one of the "big clouds." That's where my non-technically inclined, but paranoid father gets his e-mail. Though my father also uses a prepaid flip phone that he doesn't carry out as his only phone line, so maybe not quite normal either.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Facebook et al have been working hard at convincing "normal" people that cloud is a dirty word. They have been more successful than one might think, judging by some of the questions I get from non-techie friends.
- eps 5y ago
  I don't think the do actually. Not with "a hardware root of trust" in the description.
miked85 5y ago
I feel like anyone technical enough to know and care what this product is, are also totally capable of setting it up themselves.
- old-gregg 5y ago
  Are you saying that millions of people who order sunny side up egg breakfast aren't capable of making one for themselves? :)
  - miked85 5y ago
    In many cases, yes. But that is a poor comparison.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Disagree. We pay for convenience all the time. I just did in buying a synology NAS even though I could have pieces together my own solution (and have in the past). Having a working, maintained, stable, full featured email server that interops with the world isn’t something you can do quickly on your own even if you have the skills.
      - miked85 5y ago
        Of course, I agree with that. But this is, at least in my opinion, a very niche product. People who even understand what the product is would probably not be willing to pay a subscription for something they could setup on their own. Of course I could be completely wrong :)
        rblatz 5y ago
        Email is hard to do right, first I’m likely going to spend 2-3x the price on a server, so instantly we have 5 years of subscription covered by that price. Then I have to buy an IP in a space that has a good reputation. Then I need to setup offsite backups, setup TLS and DKIM, plus a lot of stuff I’m sure I’m missing. Then I have to stay on top of patches and general maintenance. Plus I have to buy a domain name. Suddenly we’re looking at let’s say a 10 year lifespan before you need to upgrade. You are probably going to be basically even on costs but home built has a hundred of hours sunk into it too.
old-gregg 5y ago
I care about owning my own data very much. This makes me conservative when it comes to these solutions, despite otherwise being an early adopter of everything tech. For that reason I always recommend Synology NAS machines. They have been around forever, they work for years on autopilot and feel very similar to a microwave in terms of operational overhead. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. But most importantly, the ecosystem is stable and mature. And they are easy to understand and reason about and come with a slick UI with mobile apps. My favorite feature is having my massive photo collection always available on my phone, served from my own basement (with encrypted AWS Glacier backups). [EDIT] This is Brandon Phillips of CoreOS fame sharing this! Maybe I should take a closer look then.
- sneak 5y ago
  The device in TFA seems to primarily serve as a mailserver. AIUI that's not really what a NAS does.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- azinman2 5y ago
  How do you access your NAS remotely? Does it end up creating some kind of backdoor into your network with cloud support? That makes me nervous…
  - old-gregg 5y ago
    In a very boring and traditional way: you buy a domain name, configure dynamic DNS, and then use port forwarding in your home firewall. No 3rd party proxies.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Not sure that makes me anymore comfortable! Open port to my storage from the internet? But I’m glad they’re not backdooring anything….
fsniper 5y ago
The name and terminology is unfortunately too close to the other helm. [helm.sh]
miked85 5y ago
> Truly private email. The marketing is heavy on this site.
1MachineElf 5y ago
According to their blog post How Helm Works - Part 1: Networking [0], on the AWS side of things, for each Helm unit, they are provisioning an EC2 instance, an Elastic IP, and a Route 53 config. I suppose the 128GB backup is also part of this. From my perspective, $99/yr is not a bad deal for all this to be automatically managed. [0] https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networking https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networki...
- thesausageking 5y ago
  So you're tied to an EC2 instance? That seems like an unnecessary centralization point.
  - awill 5y ago
    yep. It serves to justify the subscription though, which is what all businesses want. Ongoing money vs a one-time purchase. I personally quite like the idea of an appliance for email. But adding a permanent subscription that not only costs a lot of money, but will stop working if the company has an outage or goes out of business means it isn't targetted at me. If you require AWS and have offsite backups then the product isn't an 'own your own data' product as it's advertised. At that point, why not just pay for managed email. It's cheaper, and probably easier to migrate if there are problems.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  So the first thing this "personal server that lives where you do" does is spin up some AWS instance? No thank you.
  - sneak 5y ago
    If the TLS is terminated on the device and all it's using AWS for is a static ip and inbound port for email, that seems pretty harmless.
    - gsreenivas 5y ago
ritcgab 5y ago
A raspberry pi 4 can do everything this machine does.
- gsreenivas 5y ago
  Actually no. There is no support for secure boot or proper encrypted storage with a protected key. We prototyped on Pis a while back before we shipped our v1 but there are meaningful limitations.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    1. Secure boot is supported on Raspberry Pi, just not out-of-the-box. There's plenty of solutions in this field for your respective needs. 2. Raspberry Pi supports LUKS perfectly fine, making disk encryption a snap.
    - gsreenivas 5y ago
      Would love to see what documentation you have around both of these points. I have not seen anything that indicates the SoC for the Pi supports eFuse or any other OTP storage.
      - slenk 5y ago
        Not OP, but this looks promising after a little searching: https://askubuntu.com/questions/599825/yubikey-two-factor-authentication-full-disk-encryption-via-luks/1158930#1158930 https://askubuntu.com/questions/599825/yubikey-two-factor-au...
        gsreenivas 5y ago
        Great for laptops/desktops, horrible for servers. You would have to be present for the challenge/response on a reboot. Also, doesn't solve the secure boot issue. FDE w/o secure boot isn't particularly useful.
- philips 5y ago
philips 5y ago
I received my Helm v2 last week and it has worked great for Android photo backup and email subscriptions like substack. I have not been bold enough yet to move my primary email domain over yet. Apple mail and Fairmail on Android give a nice non-web email experience. I like the product concept, the execution seems solid, and I like the auto update flow compared to manual update of most NAS products. I really want this product when my kids get their first phone to keep their photos, calendar and emails off the cloud. At least until they can make the choice that they want that stuff being tracked. Edit: Oh and I really like their user experience around creating generated device specific passwords for each client device (phone, laptop, etc) a user owns.
- ccamrobertson 5y ago
  Glad to see a v2. Like some other folks here I eye rolled when I saw some of the claims on the v1, but I think between this thread and revised marketing copy I understand and appreciate their approach. My biggest concern now isn't about some backdoor or the ability to scan email in flight, but rather the lack of any commitment around continuity in the event they are acquired or cease to exist. I would like to use them for email, but am wary of the headache of having to roll a matching EC2 setup at a moments notice and migrating to a new IP.
yashasolutions 5y ago
This should be encouraged and supported. While I do have many questions, which would definitely delay an impulse buy, it is of general interest to have more companies trying to create easy to use products that help people to cut the cord with 5 companies that rules our digital lives today. Now on with the questions I'd love to clarify: - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware? - Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be?
- philips 5y ago
  I have one and really like it! 1. Like most things you have to trust the company producing everything. The closest thing I have seen to auditable hardware is Bunnie's Precursor. 2. You cannot install your own applications right now. And the updates happen automatically.
- gsreenivas 5y ago
  Great questions: > - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware? We use a verified boot process to ensure trusted bits are running on the HW. > - Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be? Not yet - but we are planning for customers to be able to run their own services in the future. We have quite a few updates to do before we get there. The upgrades happen OTA, seamlessly in the background. There is no root access on the machine locally or remotely.
  - philderbeast 5y ago
    how can an end user confirm this is infact true, and confirm that the updates are also free from any similar nasty issues. can the user control the updates, including choosing when, what and if they happen.
pluc 5y ago
It's a little odd that the whole premise is own your data and then when you go to order and there's a recurring subscription fee that you can't opt out of
- a3n 5y ago
  I guess if the data is on your helm on your home, and you can access it from your home after cutting your internet, then you do own what's on your helm.
  - gsreenivas 5y ago
    Yes, and you can. All services are available on the LAN on standard ports, even if the Helm server is not connected to the internet.
- Brendinooo 5y ago
  Plex is kind of like this, though Plex Pass isn't integral to the base functionality and you can buy a lifetime membership at least.
pnw 5y ago
Helm v1 user here, very happy with the product. For 99% of people without the desire and skills to run their own servers, this is the best solution.
- philips 5y ago
  I am a Helm v2 user and I agree. I got tired trying to keep a NAS running and later configuring a Raspberry Pi 4 correctly to run off the right disks, stay up to date, and configured correctly for NextCloud. With two kids I don't have time to tinker.
smoldesu 5y ago
Looks really cool, but the subscription is a total dealbreaker. I might pick one up used a few years down the line if someone manages to load custom operating systems on it.
wcerfgba 5y ago
From [1]: > Does Helm have access to my emails? > The architecture of the system has been designed so that it's not possible for Helm to access your emails. Email senders now support sending emails over an encrypted SSL/TLS channel where the email is only decrypted once it reaches your personal email server. Helm is not able to decode these emails because we don't have access to the encryption key. In the limited situations where the sender's email server doesn't send the email to you over SSL/TLS, Helm does not log or store these messages and therefore we are still not able to access them. SSL/TLS is transport security, and email is inherently multi-hop, so this reads as bogus to me: each hop might use SSL/TLS but that doesn't mean the message content or metadata is end-to-end encrypted until it gets to my Helm server. [1] https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2 https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2
- gsreenivas 5y ago
  There are no hops for Helm customers. The TLS connections for their domains terminate on their Helm server.
- smitop 5y ago
  I don't know how this is actually implemented, but it would be possible to do this as described if the static IP provided by Helm just proxied all incoming packets directly to the personal server, without acting as a relay server at the SMTP protocol level but instead just being a dumb proxy. There's no reason that Helm would need to act as a mail hop at the SMTP layer or do TLS termination anyways. The reason that the using the server's actual IP wouldn't work is that most residential IP ranges are responsible for mostly spam (so most outgoing email would likely be filtered), and some ISPs don't assign static IPv4 addresses to residential users (IPv6 would fix the later issue, but mass IPv6 adoption isn't going to happen for a while).
- wmf 5y ago
  Realistically email is one hop from the sender's MTA to the receiver's.
giantg2 5y ago
Seems pretty cool. A little pricey and maybe even overpowered. The biggest thing that holds me back from hosting my own server is probably lack of static IP and the time/cognitive overhead of maintenance/security.
- notimetorelax 5y ago
  Have been hosting home servers behind DynamicDNS for 5 years now. Have never had any issues because of it. E.g. Namecheap supports the protocol - no need for extra subscription.
  - movedx 5y ago
    But are you hosting your own emails? That's the important thing here. Everything else is fine, but hosting and operating a custom email service is hard if you want to also reach other people's inboxes.
- davidzweig 5y ago
  For IP, you can get a domain adress from namecheap then set up dynamic DNS (https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/583/11/how-do-i-configure-ddclient/ https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...). Maintenance/security.. log in from time to time and run 'apt update && apt upgrade' ?
  - gsreenivas 5y ago
    residential IP addresses are generally blacklisted by email services
    - slenk 5y ago
      yeah but so are AWS ips
      - gsreenivas 5y ago
        we have blocks of AWS IPs with no issues and we also have our own IP blocks
Causality1 5y ago
I like it, but I can't help the feeling this is going to go the way of 90% of modern products: either goes broke in five years and shuts down or becomes successful and in five years gets bought by Google and shut down to force customers onto their new "Nest Server" service.
zapt02 5y ago
I think I'm the target market for this - I run my own cloud on a personal server in my closet. I've been thinking of replacing it with something more compact, so Helm looks great. However, I would never buy this considering the mandatory $99 subscription service. It's too expensive for what it provides, the device price isn't properly subsidized to make up for the high subscription cost, and I might not even want to self-host mail but do want the other services.
solarkraft 5y ago
Many people here, including myself, are heavily turned off by the mandatory subscription that costs as much for 2 years as an entire device. However, the service provided as part of the subscription, a static IP address forwarding to your device without terminating the TLS connection is actually cool. For about 30$/year (24$ sounds good), I'd absolutely buy that alone, since that's the key to the tag line - truly private e-mail. I can build a home server myself (and in fact already have, with more features, though not nearly as elegant as a Helm). I'd be just fine with someone else running that service. Hardware wise, besides the storage, Helm looks like a great little home server, especially for the (hopefully not subscription-subsidized ...) price. If it had slots for my own drives I'd seriously consider buying one. The yocto-based software is a bit of a downside, as I'd prefer something like a Debian for maintenance reasons, but setting that up manually would sure be possible.
- rubatuga 5y ago
  Not directly competing with Helm, but we at Hoppy Network provide a static IP over WireGuard. It came out of a desire for "truly private email". We provide: Clean IPv4 + IPv6 address, Reverse DNS, unblocked ports, unfiltered ICMP It's priced reasonably to keep bad actors out: https://hoppy.network https://hoppy.network We have a $60/year plan in the works, which will be available before the end of this year.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Awesome, I was just looking for something like this the other day! SEO feedback: Try to be discoverable via term like "ipv4 tunnel provider", you may get more search leads. In my mind I was looking for an inverse Hurricane Electric. Also, do you have any plans at all to accept payments via cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin? That would make you guys a no-brainer.
    - rubatuga 5y ago
      Thanks for the SEO feedback, definitely something we will look into! We currently use Stripe, and I don't think Stripe has any plans to bring back crypto payments :(
hendersoon 5y ago
The price for both hardware ($199) and subscription ($99/year) seems pretty reasonable. I could set something similar up myself, but then I would need to _maintain_ it, and doing email properly so Google doesn't mark everything as spam is non-trivial. I don't like the idea of essentially opening up a bunch of ports to the internet. If you connect to their AWS endpoint on a bunch of ports (25, 80, 443, etc) that connection is transparently redirected to the device in your LAN over a point-to-point VPN. You can lock it down by putting the device on a VLAN and firewalling it off, of course. Ultimately you're making a bet on Helm properly maintaining its software, security updates, etc, and more importantly being around longterm to do so. That's where I just stick with Google. Gmail (and GSuite or whatever they brand it as these days) isn't a service I'm at all concerned about Google kicking to the curb. If you're serious about disconnecting from the cloud, though, this is a neat product and service. I hope it succeeds; if it's around a couple more years I'll switch.
philderbeast 5y ago
lots of marketing, not much substance here for me. the manditory subscription with no option to avoid it is a 100% non-starter for me. I would much prefer a documented method for seting up my own cloud cutout with a variety of providers then be stuck with whatever they choose and no way to change it to something of my own chosing, particularly with the cost of the subscription.
dua2020 5y ago
yunohost is a decent FOSS self-hosting debian-based OS, they even offer a free DDNS service/domain, a nice web gui to install apps/services and one can always ssh in and config manually
- sprkwd 5y ago
  This is what I use and it’s excellent.
cymor 5y ago
Is no one going to mention the name collision with the kubernetes tool?
- gulbrandr 5y ago
  This. I was surprised to find this comment so deep.
zenlf 5y ago
If I'm drawing an analogy here, owning your server and hosting your own services is like having your own house and having a SAAS is like renting a house. A lot of people want to own their house while too many service/hardware providers are trying to be your landlords. This is a cool idea but I think having a mandatory subscription killed it for me. It does not even provide an illusion that I can still have my own services intact and running indefinitely no matter what happens to or at the service provider. This is especially crucial when you consider how much of a pain switching email is. Do I move out of Google just to be dependent on another company that requires a subscription for the illusion of owning my data? On top of that I have to deal with all the hassle that comes with it? I don't think so.
- homedrive 5y ago
  If Nextcloud is all you need, you are welcome to check out HomeDrive: https://www.homedrive.io/ https://www.homedrive.io/ It also terminates TLS at the box, and has no recurring charges.
natural219 5y ago
So, I'm highly attracted to the marketing (I work in the "personal server" market, mostly reselling NAS devices). Overall I'm a bit disappointed with the price per capability ($450 + $100 every year after that for a 1TB server from what I'm reading). But as one the first forays into what I feel is a huge upcoming market, it's fair to start at a premium price point as you experiment with different form factors/features/costs/etc. I more personally lament the creeping buzzword-ification of "personal server" messaging. There's a burgeoning array of different underlying meanings for the terms "personal", "server", "own your own data", "full privacy", etc. It seems likely that terms like these will continue grow in popularity with adwords searches, so you can expect more companies and products to use this claim to sell a particular architecture with a potentially large set of technical trade-offs between various ideas of "server ownership". Ultimately where I think the general trend towards "server ownership" will land, like all new important technologies as they get integrated into the rest of society, is with a company/product that best navigates a rather tricky balance between the affirmed value of "ownership" (et cetera) vs the individual's willingness to get their hands dirty with a slightly more sophisticated, but more robust understanding of the underlying architecture. Put simply; the less the "end-user" knows about the fundamentals of their personal computing stack, the less capable they'll be when it comes time to reason about the right decisions for them regarding privacy, security, modularity, longevity, and the other various desirable properties of a personal computing stack that truly meets their needs (as parents, citizens, businesspeople, etc). The victor of this trend will be the one that best facilitates true "end-user" empowerment, with minimal gotchas.
deleted 5y ago
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uselpa 5y ago
I like the product, I understand the subscription, but I don’t get it when someone tries to sell « secure email » (looking especially at you, Protonmail). Email in itself is never going to be universally secure, that cause is lost to the simplicity and the federated aspect of the protocol, and it’s ok… just don’t try to tell me otherwise.
zeronine 5y ago
I feel like this is just capialising on people's privacy and security fears. Helm provides an offsite backup anyway, so why not just use a NextCloud provider + Cryptomator? And email is a nightmare to self host and maintain, especially for a primary address. If you need real secure communication just use something other than email.
- msh 5y ago
  There is a quite good review here: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/ https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/ That also explains why you might want it.
simfoo 5y ago
Interesting project! I'd feel much safer though if the server-side stack were available open-source to self-host. They can still offer the subscription for people who don't want to self-host.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Good job, you committed trademark infringement: https://trademarks.justia.com/869/59/helm-86959819.html https://trademarks.justia.com/869/59/helm-86959819.html
dsr_ 5y ago
Summing up: - the hardware looks okay - the mandatory subscription provides value, but if the company folds, all the services go away and there's no instructions on how to set them up yourself -- at which point you might as well have bought an RPi with a preconfig'd distro. - The selling point is "escape Big Tech" but the services are provisioned via AWS. - The CEO is arguing with people here telling them that they are wrong about what they want. - The owner doesn't have root access and Helm does. They promise that they can't look at your stuff, but of course they can.
- a012 5y ago
  In the other words: get locked down with our small tech. But seriously, they own the root account means you have a backdoor to your data vault, are their customers ok with that?
- phone8675309 5y ago
  It shows how much people distrust big surveillance tech that snake oil like this can thrive.
  - api 5y ago
    If you look for privacy or security and and are not knowledgeable in the subject, you will find a whole lot of snake oil. Some of it, like VPNs that log your traffic, is worse than nothing. Some of it is outright scams.
- api 5y ago
  - It monetizes a bunch of third party open source projects like NextCloud and probably gives nothing back, and doesn't even give the user full control.
- miked85 5y ago
  > - The CEO is arguing with people here telling them that they are wrong about what they want. The CEO's comments in this post should be enough to make anyone think twice before buying this product.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I used to run my own mail server for decades. I gave up when it became nearly impossible for my domain not to end up on some list or some reputation. The big cloud email providers make it a lot of work to run your own. A friend of mine tried setting up a mail server a couple of months ago at Digital Ocean on a VPS and a couple of others and his mail bounced back all over the place. I ended up with an account at one of the big ones, and then using fetch mail to store all email locally. Only the very latest reside on the cloud server for a max of 10 minutes. All outgoing mail is through my account the cloud provider. Does Helm here provide a façade for the mail server that handles all the security setup and reputation management? Or does each user with Helm have to try to get their email working on their own? (A huge pain)
- elzbardico 5y ago
  I found a compromise by hosting my email with a company that makes their money out of selling email hosting and stuff instead of advertising. Not being American companies is a bonus to me, as much as I loathe facebook and google, the government is always a far more sinister threat.
  - Lendal 5y ago
    That depends on which government. Ever tried sending a FOIA request to Facebook or Google? Within a few miles of my home I can walk into a number of government offices of my local representatives and I can at the very least air my grievances. Sometimes they even can do something about it. Optionally but less effectively I can use a phone or email. There is no Google or Facebook office anywhere around here. Even if there were, I would have no right to enter their offices or ask to speak to the person in charge. They're under no obligation to hear my grievances. You can see almost everything the government is up to. You can't see anything Facebook and Google are up to. They're a black box. The law is on their side to keep it that way, forever. They can change their policies at any time with no notice and no public debate or comment. And that makes them a less "sinister threat" than a democratically elected, constitutional government with representation distributed all the way down to the neighborhood level? Fascinating.
- 5y ago
denton-scratch 5y ago
"Innovative hardware"? It says it's an ARM, with a secure root of trust. There's this Bluetooth "proximity token". Looks cool, I guess. It's running Linux, Dovecot, Postfix and Nextcloud. "Email senders now support sending emails over an encrypted SSL/TLS channel where the email is only decrypted once it reaches your personal email server. Helm is not able to decode these emails because we don't have access to the encryption key." Yabbut, Helm is that personal email server; Helm is the terminator of the TLS encryption. The email is in plaintext by the time it reaches Postfix. Postfix then stores it in an encrypted disk, but Helm can decrypt the disk. Please try again! Then there's this business about email deliverability. My experience is that if you have run a nice, clean email domain for (say) 8 years, then you won't have serious deliverability problems for personal email. But if that's the case, then you already know how to set up and run an email server, right? People on HN are saying that Helm retains the root account on this device, but I can't find that information on the website. If it's true, then that would be completely the opposite of retaining control of your own data. Here is a pile of FOSS software, running on commodity hardware, where I have complete control; and here's Helm, with the same stuff, but - a proximity key, and offsite backup - in exchange for $100PA subscription, and I have to hand over root. What's the benefit, and how come they're sold out?
- nijave 5y ago
  >My experience is that if you have run a nice, clean email domain for (say) 8 years, then you won't have serious deliverability problems for personal email I thought that, too, until the entire Digital Ocean netblock my IP was in started landing on abuse lists
fraktl 5y ago
Saw subscription, instantly closed the window. Didn't waste time reading further.
somberi 5y ago
@gsreenivas - Congrats on launching an useful service. Is it still true that whenever we provision a new user they have to be physically present near a Helm device? Parents living elsewhere, and so are kids. How does the pricing work if someone owns their domain already and prefers to keep their registrar? Is the cost still 99$? This may make an interesting alternative for small businesses (10-20 employees) who prefer private storage and email addresses. Do you have any feedback for customers looking to use it as such? Thanks.
amarant 5y ago
No, helm is a tool for installing and managing applications in a kubernetes cluster. You've named your product wrong.
- lancesells 5y ago
  There can be many helms. In my world Helm is a synth: https://tytel.org/helm/ https://tytel.org/helm/
  - amarant 5y ago
    I mean sure, and it's also where you steer a boat from. But now there are 2 helms in the hosting world, which means neither context nor name is distinguishable between the two. So they named it wrong.
syrkis 5y ago
Shoulda called it the Hillary
tehabe 5y ago
I currently use an Synology DS116, a small and simple NAS which I mostly use to backup my Mac via Time Mashine but I can't even find if this is supported on such a machine. It seems it is an NAS but without the being called a NAS, e.g. I haven't found anything about SMB or SFTP support.
- tehabe 5y ago
  I asked and no, this device does not support SMB or SFTP. So it is worthless for me.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
someonehere 5y ago
Considered this for home. Then asked myself, “what happens if they’re gone in five years? I’ll be looking for the next thing to replace this.” If Google or Apple made something like this, I’d bite. However I don’t know who these people are, how much runway they have left, life expectancy of the product, and how open and secure this is.
crawsome 5y ago
It’s a hard drive that requires a subscription it’s no different than another cloud service, actually they charge you more because they require their hardware.
tonoto 5y ago
But why another hardware appliance in the home? I'm turned off by having another hardware device at my home. If it instead was a turnkey solution or a virtual appliance, that I could put besides my already existing instances, that might catch my interest.

242 points by philips 5y ago

$99 a year for 128GB of backup space is really high, but I suppose it's partially paying for the OS updates or something like that? I also wonder about name confusion with Helm the Kubernetes management system.. That said it looks like a nice setup, the hardware price is pretty reasonable for a completed product, and the website is trying to keep things simple.

rodolphoarruda 5y ago
And I wonder how this could work for the 1TB version. Would it compress things locally so they could fit into the available 128GB space?
- Saris 5y ago
  Unless it's really specific content that wouldn't even be possible, I assume you just don't get your stuff backed up lol
- gsreenivas 5y ago
  Hi there - Helm co-founder/CEO here. We will have additional tiers of subscription for customers to back up additional data with us. Everything is locally compressed before uploading and all backups are encrypted with keys only customers have.
  - Saris 5y ago
    Is it not on the site maybe? So far I haven't been able to find anything but the 128GB option.
    - gsreenivas 5y ago
      We haven't launched these tiers yet - that's why
      - phone8675309 5y ago
        Why would you allow customers to purchase hardware with storage capacity that you can’t fully support on the back-end yet?
      - philderbeast 5y ago
        your comments just keep getting better "we have additional teirs..... but we havent launched them yet" so you DON'T in fact have addtional teirs since I can't buy them, resulting in only 128gig of cloud backup being availble regardless of what hardware I buy. Not to mention this "cloud backup" takes my files back out of my control and hands them over to big tech (apparently encrypted, but from your other comments there is no way to verify that since there is no option for the user to access the device)
shoo 5y ago
maybe it's also partly to deal with the ongoing costs of customer support.
twobitshifter 5y ago
For name confusion, I thought of helm the famous emacs package.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Or famous freeware synthesizer by Matt Tytel.
  - theblazehen 5y ago
    Or the kubernetes package manager
    - comprev 5y ago
      This was my first thought too. Having the same name as the most popular package manager for the most popular container orchestrator seems unwise.

satyanash 5y ago

Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.

remram 5y ago
It seems that Nextcloud, Postfix, and Strongswan are copyleft. > You may obtain the complete corresponding source code from us for a period of three years after our last shipment of this product by sending a money order or check for $5 to: <snailmail address> Without being illegal this is rather hostile. But then again they are selling subscriptions to open-source software so I expected something shady.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an online accessible version of it. Charging a small amount for a copy of the source is fine. And I will go so far as to say that making demands about access to the source code in a manner beyond what the GPL requires, is actually hurting the adoption of GPL software, not helping it. Why should a company base their work on GPL licensed software if they are going to meet pushback even when they are complying with the letter of the GPL? They might just build something different all together, and with no open source at all. And where does that leave us? Definitely in a worse place.
  - chrisfosterelli 5y ago
    Hypothetically, could one not use this to get around GPL by modifying GPL software and agreeing to make the changes available to others but only at a ridiculous price?

kderbyma 5y ago

working on an open source version of these. called the Calliope Muse+ - it should be available for pre-order soon. if you want a non-subscription option

philips 5y ago
Do you have a link?

71a54xd 5y ago

No thanks, this wreaks of a monthly subscription I don't want that would result in unsupported buggy "hardware" in 10 years guaranteed. I'll keep my ZFS server with a text file reminding me how I configured it for now (since I usually forget after a few months)!

MonadIsPronad 5y ago
"reeks" was the word you wanted, I think
- 71a54xd 5y ago
  Thank you kind stranger ;)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

digitalsushi 5y ago

If I could reliably transfer my gmail legacy freebie grandfather thing account without it taking 7 to 11 days of API rate limited transfer at 100% luck, I would get my email out of there. Alas.

eps 5y ago
If it's a one-time thing, then even it taking weeks is quite acceptable.
h4waii 5y ago
Fire up gyb [0] now, and by the time this (or whatever solution you want) is ready for an import, you'll be done. 0. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
- philips 5y ago
  Why this and not takeout?
breakingcups 5y ago
Would Google Takeout not suffice in this, maybe after some post-processing?
gsreenivas 5y ago
A workaround is to set up a desktop email client - allow it to fully sync, then use the desktop email client to export your email and import to another account. Google rate limiting and restricting access to your own data is pretty awful. They are similarly terrible about OAuth permissions for 3rd parties - some companies are allowed to export data on behalf of customers while others are not.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Doing this via an email client is going to be really slow. Use something like fetchmail.

flixic 5y ago

It seems they are targeting "normal" people (to whom word "dockerized" sounds like a misspelling of something happening in a port). Mixing "normal" people and self-hosted email is a recipe for very bad experience.

ttul 5y ago
I suppose this is their gamble: can they make something that is so easy to use, even a normal person will be happy with it. That being said, how many “normal” people are really so concerned about email security that they don’t trust one of the big clouds?
- Talanes 5y ago
  They exist, if you don't consider Protonmail one of the "big clouds." That's where my non-technically inclined, but paranoid father gets his e-mail. Though my father also uses a prepaid flip phone that he doesn't carry out as his only phone line, so maybe not quite normal either.
- int_19h 5y ago
  Facebook et al have been working hard at convincing "normal" people that cloud is a dirty word. They have been more successful than one might think, judging by some of the questions I get from non-techie friends.
eps 5y ago
I don't think the do actually. Not with "a hardware root of trust" in the description.

miked85 5y ago

I feel like anyone technical enough to know and care what this product is, are also totally capable of setting it up themselves.

old-gregg 5y ago
Are you saying that millions of people who order sunny side up egg breakfast aren't capable of making one for themselves? :)
- miked85 5y ago
  In many cases, yes. But that is a poor comparison.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Disagree. We pay for convenience all the time. I just did in buying a synology NAS even though I could have pieces together my own solution (and have in the past). Having a working, maintained, stable, full featured email server that interops with the world isn’t something you can do quickly on your own even if you have the skills.
    - miked85 5y ago
      Of course, I agree with that. But this is, at least in my opinion, a very niche product. People who even understand what the product is would probably not be willing to pay a subscription for something they could setup on their own. Of course I could be completely wrong :)
      - rblatz 5y ago
        Email is hard to do right, first I’m likely going to spend 2-3x the price on a server, so instantly we have 5 years of subscription covered by that price. Then I have to buy an IP in a space that has a good reputation. Then I need to setup offsite backups, setup TLS and DKIM, plus a lot of stuff I’m sure I’m missing. Then I have to stay on top of patches and general maintenance. Plus I have to buy a domain name. Suddenly we’re looking at let’s say a 10 year lifespan before you need to upgrade. You are probably going to be basically even on costs but home built has a hundred of hours sunk into it too.

old-gregg 5y ago

I care about owning my own data very much. This makes me conservative when it comes to these solutions, despite otherwise being an early adopter of everything tech. For that reason I always recommend Synology NAS machines. They have been around forever, they work for years on autopilot and feel very similar to a microwave in terms of operational overhead. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. But most importantly, the ecosystem is stable and mature. And they are easy to understand and reason about and come with a slick UI with mobile apps. My favorite feature is having my massive photo collection always available on my phone, served from my own basement (with encrypted AWS Glacier backups). [EDIT] This is Brandon Phillips of CoreOS fame sharing this! Maybe I should take a closer look then.

sneak 5y ago
The device in TFA seems to primarily serve as a mailserver. AIUI that's not really what a NAS does.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
azinman2 5y ago
How do you access your NAS remotely? Does it end up creating some kind of backdoor into your network with cloud support? That makes me nervous…
- old-gregg 5y ago
  In a very boring and traditional way: you buy a domain name, configure dynamic DNS, and then use port forwarding in your home firewall. No 3rd party proxies.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Not sure that makes me anymore comfortable! Open port to my storage from the internet? But I’m glad they’re not backdooring anything….

fsniper 5y ago

The name and terminology is unfortunately too close to the other helm. [helm.sh]

miked85 5y ago

> Truly private email. The marketing is heavy on this site.

1MachineElf 5y ago

According to their blog post How Helm Works - Part 1: Networking [0], on the AWS side of things, for each Helm unit, they are provisioning an EC2 instance, an Elastic IP, and a Route 53 config. I suppose the 128GB backup is also part of this. From my perspective, $99/yr is not a bad deal for all this to be automatically managed. [0] https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networking https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networki...

thesausageking 5y ago
So you're tied to an EC2 instance? That seems like an unnecessary centralization point.
- awill 5y ago
  yep. It serves to justify the subscription though, which is what all businesses want. Ongoing money vs a one-time purchase. I personally quite like the idea of an appliance for email. But adding a permanent subscription that not only costs a lot of money, but will stop working if the company has an outage or goes out of business means it isn't targetted at me. If you require AWS and have offsite backups then the product isn't an 'own your own data' product as it's advertised. At that point, why not just pay for managed email. It's cheaper, and probably easier to migrate if there are problems.
stefan_ 5y ago
So the first thing this "personal server that lives where you do" does is spin up some AWS instance? No thank you.
- sneak 5y ago
  If the TLS is terminated on the device and all it's using AWS for is a static ip and inbound port for email, that seems pretty harmless.
  - gsreenivas 5y ago

ritcgab 5y ago

A raspberry pi 4 can do everything this machine does.

gsreenivas 5y ago
Actually no. There is no support for secure boot or proper encrypted storage with a protected key. We prototyped on Pis a while back before we shipped our v1 but there are meaningful limitations.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  1. Secure boot is supported on Raspberry Pi, just not out-of-the-box. There's plenty of solutions in this field for your respective needs. 2. Raspberry Pi supports LUKS perfectly fine, making disk encryption a snap.
  - gsreenivas 5y ago
    Would love to see what documentation you have around both of these points. I have not seen anything that indicates the SoC for the Pi supports eFuse or any other OTP storage.
    - slenk 5y ago
      Not OP, but this looks promising after a little searching: https://askubuntu.com/questions/599825/yubikey-two-factor-authentication-full-disk-encryption-via-luks/1158930#1158930 https://askubuntu.com/questions/599825/yubikey-two-factor-au...
      - gsreenivas 5y ago
        Great for laptops/desktops, horrible for servers. You would have to be present for the challenge/response on a reboot. Also, doesn't solve the secure boot issue. FDE w/o secure boot isn't particularly useful.
philips 5y ago

philips 5y ago

I received my Helm v2 last week and it has worked great for Android photo backup and email subscriptions like substack. I have not been bold enough yet to move my primary email domain over yet. Apple mail and Fairmail on Android give a nice non-web email experience. I like the product concept, the execution seems solid, and I like the auto update flow compared to manual update of most NAS products. I really want this product when my kids get their first phone to keep their photos, calendar and emails off the cloud. At least until they can make the choice that they want that stuff being tracked. Edit: Oh and I really like their user experience around creating generated device specific passwords for each client device (phone, laptop, etc) a user owns.

ccamrobertson 5y ago
Glad to see a v2. Like some other folks here I eye rolled when I saw some of the claims on the v1, but I think between this thread and revised marketing copy I understand and appreciate their approach. My biggest concern now isn't about some backdoor or the ability to scan email in flight, but rather the lack of any commitment around continuity in the event they are acquired or cease to exist. I would like to use them for email, but am wary of the headache of having to roll a matching EC2 setup at a moments notice and migrating to a new IP.

yashasolutions 5y ago

This should be encouraged and supported. While I do have many questions, which would definitely delay an impulse buy, it is of general interest to have more companies trying to create easy to use products that help people to cut the cord with 5 companies that rules our digital lives today. Now on with the questions I'd love to clarify: - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware? - Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be?

philips 5y ago
I have one and really like it! 1. Like most things you have to trust the company producing everything. The closest thing I have seen to auditable hardware is Bunnie's Precursor. 2. You cannot install your own applications right now. And the updates happen automatically.
gsreenivas 5y ago
Great questions: > - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware? We use a verified boot process to ensure trusted bits are running on the HW. > - Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be? Not yet - but we are planning for customers to be able to run their own services in the future. We have quite a few updates to do before we get there. The upgrades happen OTA, seamlessly in the background. There is no root access on the machine locally or remotely.
- philderbeast 5y ago
  how can an end user confirm this is infact true, and confirm that the updates are also free from any similar nasty issues. can the user control the updates, including choosing when, what and if they happen.

pluc 5y ago

It's a little odd that the whole premise is own your data and then when you go to order and there's a recurring subscription fee that you can't opt out of

a3n 5y ago
I guess if the data is on your helm on your home, and you can access it from your home after cutting your internet, then you do own what's on your helm.
- gsreenivas 5y ago
  Yes, and you can. All services are available on the LAN on standard ports, even if the Helm server is not connected to the internet.
Brendinooo 5y ago
Plex is kind of like this, though Plex Pass isn't integral to the base functionality and you can buy a lifetime membership at least.

pnw 5y ago

Helm v1 user here, very happy with the product. For 99% of people without the desire and skills to run their own servers, this is the best solution.

philips 5y ago
I am a Helm v2 user and I agree. I got tired trying to keep a NAS running and later configuring a Raspberry Pi 4 correctly to run off the right disks, stay up to date, and configured correctly for NextCloud. With two kids I don't have time to tinker.

smoldesu 5y ago

Looks really cool, but the subscription is a total dealbreaker. I might pick one up used a few years down the line if someone manages to load custom operating systems on it.

wcerfgba 5y ago

From [1]: > Does Helm have access to my emails? > The architecture of the system has been designed so that it's not possible for Helm to access your emails. Email senders now support sending emails over an encrypted SSL/TLS channel where the email is only decrypted once it reaches your personal email server. Helm is not able to decode these emails because we don't have access to the encryption key. In the limited situations where the sender's email server doesn't send the email to you over SSL/TLS, Helm does not log or store these messages and therefore we are still not able to access them. SSL/TLS is transport security, and email is inherently multi-hop, so this reads as bogus to me: each hop might use SSL/TLS but that doesn't mean the message content or metadata is end-to-end encrypted until it gets to my Helm server. [1] https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2 https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2

gsreenivas 5y ago
There are no hops for Helm customers. The TLS connections for their domains terminate on their Helm server.
smitop 5y ago
I don't know how this is actually implemented, but it would be possible to do this as described if the static IP provided by Helm just proxied all incoming packets directly to the personal server, without acting as a relay server at the SMTP protocol level but instead just being a dumb proxy. There's no reason that Helm would need to act as a mail hop at the SMTP layer or do TLS termination anyways. The reason that the using the server's actual IP wouldn't work is that most residential IP ranges are responsible for mostly spam (so most outgoing email would likely be filtered), and some ISPs don't assign static IPv4 addresses to residential users (IPv6 would fix the later issue, but mass IPv6 adoption isn't going to happen for a while).
wmf 5y ago
Realistically email is one hop from the sender's MTA to the receiver's.

giantg2 5y ago

Seems pretty cool. A little pricey and maybe even overpowered. The biggest thing that holds me back from hosting my own server is probably lack of static IP and the time/cognitive overhead of maintenance/security.

notimetorelax 5y ago
Have been hosting home servers behind DynamicDNS for 5 years now. Have never had any issues because of it. E.g. Namecheap supports the protocol - no need for extra subscription.
- movedx 5y ago
  But are you hosting your own emails? That's the important thing here. Everything else is fine, but hosting and operating a custom email service is hard if you want to also reach other people's inboxes.
davidzweig 5y ago
For IP, you can get a domain adress from namecheap then set up dynamic DNS (https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/583/11/how-do-i-configure-ddclient/ https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...). Maintenance/security.. log in from time to time and run 'apt update && apt upgrade' ?
- gsreenivas 5y ago
  residential IP addresses are generally blacklisted by email services
  - slenk 5y ago
    yeah but so are AWS ips
    - gsreenivas 5y ago
      we have blocks of AWS IPs with no issues and we also have our own IP blocks

Causality1 5y ago

I like it, but I can't help the feeling this is going to go the way of 90% of modern products: either goes broke in five years and shuts down or becomes successful and in five years gets bought by Google and shut down to force customers onto their new "Nest Server" service.

zapt02 5y ago

I think I'm the target market for this - I run my own cloud on a personal server in my closet. I've been thinking of replacing it with something more compact, so Helm looks great. However, I would never buy this considering the mandatory $99 subscription service. It's too expensive for what it provides, the device price isn't properly subsidized to make up for the high subscription cost, and I might not even want to self-host mail but do want the other services.

solarkraft 5y ago

Many people here, including myself, are heavily turned off by the mandatory subscription that costs as much for 2 years as an entire device. However, the service provided as part of the subscription, a static IP address forwarding to your device without terminating the TLS connection is actually cool. For about 30$/year (24$ sounds good), I'd absolutely buy that alone, since that's the key to the tag line - truly private e-mail. I can build a home server myself (and in fact already have, with more features, though not nearly as elegant as a Helm). I'd be just fine with someone else running that service. Hardware wise, besides the storage, Helm looks like a great little home server, especially for the (hopefully not subscription-subsidized ...) price. If it had slots for my own drives I'd seriously consider buying one. The yocto-based software is a bit of a downside, as I'd prefer something like a Debian for maintenance reasons, but setting that up manually would sure be possible.

rubatuga 5y ago
Not directly competing with Helm, but we at Hoppy Network provide a static IP over WireGuard. It came out of a desire for "truly private email". We provide: Clean IPv4 + IPv6 address, Reverse DNS, unblocked ports, unfiltered ICMP It's priced reasonably to keep bad actors out: https://hoppy.network https://hoppy.network We have a $60/year plan in the works, which will be available before the end of this year.
- 3np 5y ago
  Awesome, I was just looking for something like this the other day! SEO feedback: Try to be discoverable via term like "ipv4 tunnel provider", you may get more search leads. In my mind I was looking for an inverse Hurricane Electric. Also, do you have any plans at all to accept payments via cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin? That would make you guys a no-brainer.
  - rubatuga 5y ago
    Thanks for the SEO feedback, definitely something we will look into! We currently use Stripe, and I don't think Stripe has any plans to bring back crypto payments :(

hendersoon 5y ago

The price for both hardware ($199) and subscription ($99/year) seems pretty reasonable. I could set something similar up myself, but then I would need to _maintain_ it, and doing email properly so Google doesn't mark everything as spam is non-trivial. I don't like the idea of essentially opening up a bunch of ports to the internet. If you connect to their AWS endpoint on a bunch of ports (25, 80, 443, etc) that connection is transparently redirected to the device in your LAN over a point-to-point VPN. You can lock it down by putting the device on a VLAN and firewalling it off, of course. Ultimately you're making a bet on Helm properly maintaining its software, security updates, etc, and more importantly being around longterm to do so. That's where I just stick with Google. Gmail (and GSuite or whatever they brand it as these days) isn't a service I'm at all concerned about Google kicking to the curb. If you're serious about disconnecting from the cloud, though, this is a neat product and service. I hope it succeeds; if it's around a couple more years I'll switch.

philderbeast 5y ago

lots of marketing, not much substance here for me. the manditory subscription with no option to avoid it is a 100% non-starter for me. I would much prefer a documented method for seting up my own cloud cutout with a variety of providers then be stuck with whatever they choose and no way to change it to something of my own chosing, particularly with the cost of the subscription.

dua2020 5y ago

yunohost is a decent FOSS self-hosting debian-based OS, they even offer a free DDNS service/domain, a nice web gui to install apps/services and one can always ssh in and config manually

sprkwd 5y ago
This is what I use and it’s excellent.

cymor 5y ago

Is no one going to mention the name collision with the kubernetes tool?

gulbrandr 5y ago
This. I was surprised to find this comment so deep.

zenlf 5y ago

If I'm drawing an analogy here, owning your server and hosting your own services is like having your own house and having a SAAS is like renting a house. A lot of people want to own their house while too many service/hardware providers are trying to be your landlords. This is a cool idea but I think having a mandatory subscription killed it for me. It does not even provide an illusion that I can still have my own services intact and running indefinitely no matter what happens to or at the service provider. This is especially crucial when you consider how much of a pain switching email is. Do I move out of Google just to be dependent on another company that requires a subscription for the illusion of owning my data? On top of that I have to deal with all the hassle that comes with it? I don't think so.

homedrive 5y ago
If Nextcloud is all you need, you are welcome to check out HomeDrive: https://www.homedrive.io/ https://www.homedrive.io/ It also terminates TLS at the box, and has no recurring charges.

natural219 5y ago

So, I'm highly attracted to the marketing (I work in the "personal server" market, mostly reselling NAS devices). Overall I'm a bit disappointed with the price per capability ($450 + $100 every year after that for a 1TB server from what I'm reading). But as one the first forays into what I feel is a huge upcoming market, it's fair to start at a premium price point as you experiment with different form factors/features/costs/etc. I more personally lament the creeping buzzword-ification of "personal server" messaging. There's a burgeoning array of different underlying meanings for the terms "personal", "server", "own your own data", "full privacy", etc. It seems likely that terms like these will continue grow in popularity with adwords searches, so you can expect more companies and products to use this claim to sell a particular architecture with a potentially large set of technical trade-offs between various ideas of "server ownership". Ultimately where I think the general trend towards "server ownership" will land, like all new important technologies as they get integrated into the rest of society, is with a company/product that best navigates a rather tricky balance between the affirmed value of "ownership" (et cetera) vs the individual's willingness to get their hands dirty with a slightly more sophisticated, but more robust understanding of the underlying architecture. Put simply; the less the "end-user" knows about the fundamentals of their personal computing stack, the less capable they'll be when it comes time to reason about the right decisions for them regarding privacy, security, modularity, longevity, and the other various desirable properties of a personal computing stack that truly meets their needs (as parents, citizens, businesspeople, etc). The victor of this trend will be the one that best facilitates true "end-user" empowerment, with minimal gotchas.

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uselpa 5y ago

I like the product, I understand the subscription, but I don’t get it when someone tries to sell « secure email » (looking especially at you, Protonmail). Email in itself is never going to be universally secure, that cause is lost to the simplicity and the federated aspect of the protocol, and it’s ok… just don’t try to tell me otherwise.

zeronine 5y ago

I feel like this is just capialising on people's privacy and security fears. Helm provides an offsite backup anyway, so why not just use a NextCloud provider + Cryptomator? And email is a nightmare to self host and maintain, especially for a primary address. If you need real secure communication just use something other than email.

msh 5y ago
There is a quite good review here: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/ https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/ That also explains why you might want it.

simfoo 5y ago

Interesting project! I'd feel much safer though if the server-side stack were available open-source to self-host. They can still offer the subscription for people who don't want to self-host.

encryptluks2 5y ago

Good job, you committed trademark infringement: https://trademarks.justia.com/869/59/helm-86959819.html https://trademarks.justia.com/869/59/helm-86959819.html

dsr_ 5y ago

Summing up: - the hardware looks okay - the mandatory subscription provides value, but if the company folds, all the services go away and there's no instructions on how to set them up yourself -- at which point you might as well have bought an RPi with a preconfig'd distro. - The selling point is "escape Big Tech" but the services are provisioned via AWS. - The CEO is arguing with people here telling them that they are wrong about what they want. - The owner doesn't have root access and Helm does. They promise that they can't look at your stuff, but of course they can.

a012 5y ago
In the other words: get locked down with our small tech. But seriously, they own the root account means you have a backdoor to your data vault, are their customers ok with that?
phone8675309 5y ago
It shows how much people distrust big surveillance tech that snake oil like this can thrive.
- api 5y ago
  If you look for privacy or security and and are not knowledgeable in the subject, you will find a whole lot of snake oil. Some of it, like VPNs that log your traffic, is worse than nothing. Some of it is outright scams.
api 5y ago
- It monetizes a bunch of third party open source projects like NextCloud and probably gives nothing back, and doesn't even give the user full control.
miked85 5y ago
> - The CEO is arguing with people here telling them that they are wrong about what they want. The CEO's comments in this post should be enough to make anyone think twice before buying this product.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I used to run my own mail server for decades. I gave up when it became nearly impossible for my domain not to end up on some list or some reputation. The big cloud email providers make it a lot of work to run your own. A friend of mine tried setting up a mail server a couple of months ago at Digital Ocean on a VPS and a couple of others and his mail bounced back all over the place. I ended up with an account at one of the big ones, and then using fetch mail to store all email locally. Only the very latest reside on the cloud server for a max of 10 minutes. All outgoing mail is through my account the cloud provider. Does Helm here provide a façade for the mail server that handles all the security setup and reputation management? Or does each user with Helm have to try to get their email working on their own? (A huge pain)

elzbardico 5y ago
I found a compromise by hosting my email with a company that makes their money out of selling email hosting and stuff instead of advertising. Not being American companies is a bonus to me, as much as I loathe facebook and google, the government is always a far more sinister threat.
- Lendal 5y ago
  That depends on which government. Ever tried sending a FOIA request to Facebook or Google? Within a few miles of my home I can walk into a number of government offices of my local representatives and I can at the very least air my grievances. Sometimes they even can do something about it. Optionally but less effectively I can use a phone or email. There is no Google or Facebook office anywhere around here. Even if there were, I would have no right to enter their offices or ask to speak to the person in charge. They're under no obligation to hear my grievances. You can see almost everything the government is up to. You can't see anything Facebook and Google are up to. They're a black box. The law is on their side to keep it that way, forever. They can change their policies at any time with no notice and no public debate or comment. And that makes them a less "sinister threat" than a democratically elected, constitutional government with representation distributed all the way down to the neighborhood level? Fascinating.
5y ago

denton-scratch 5y ago

"Innovative hardware"? It says it's an ARM, with a secure root of trust. There's this Bluetooth "proximity token". Looks cool, I guess. It's running Linux, Dovecot, Postfix and Nextcloud. "Email senders now support sending emails over an encrypted SSL/TLS channel where the email is only decrypted once it reaches your personal email server. Helm is not able to decode these emails because we don't have access to the encryption key." Yabbut, Helm is that personal email server; Helm is the terminator of the TLS encryption. The email is in plaintext by the time it reaches Postfix. Postfix then stores it in an encrypted disk, but Helm can decrypt the disk. Please try again! Then there's this business about email deliverability. My experience is that if you have run a nice, clean email domain for (say) 8 years, then you won't have serious deliverability problems for personal email. But if that's the case, then you already know how to set up and run an email server, right? People on HN are saying that Helm retains the root account on this device, but I can't find that information on the website. If it's true, then that would be completely the opposite of retaining control of your own data. Here is a pile of FOSS software, running on commodity hardware, where I have complete control; and here's Helm, with the same stuff, but - a proximity key, and offsite backup - in exchange for $100PA subscription, and I have to hand over root. What's the benefit, and how come they're sold out?

nijave 5y ago
>My experience is that if you have run a nice, clean email domain for (say) 8 years, then you won't have serious deliverability problems for personal email I thought that, too, until the entire Digital Ocean netblock my IP was in started landing on abuse lists

fraktl 5y ago

Saw subscription, instantly closed the window. Didn't waste time reading further.

somberi 5y ago

@gsreenivas - Congrats on launching an useful service. Is it still true that whenever we provision a new user they have to be physically present near a Helm device? Parents living elsewhere, and so are kids. How does the pricing work if someone owns their domain already and prefers to keep their registrar? Is the cost still 99$? This may make an interesting alternative for small businesses (10-20 employees) who prefer private storage and email addresses. Do you have any feedback for customers looking to use it as such? Thanks.

amarant 5y ago

No, helm is a tool for installing and managing applications in a kubernetes cluster. You've named your product wrong.

lancesells 5y ago
There can be many helms. In my world Helm is a synth: https://tytel.org/helm/ https://tytel.org/helm/
- amarant 5y ago
  I mean sure, and it's also where you steer a boat from. But now there are 2 helms in the hosting world, which means neither context nor name is distinguishable between the two. So they named it wrong.

syrkis 5y ago

Shoulda called it the Hillary

tehabe 5y ago

I currently use an Synology DS116, a small and simple NAS which I mostly use to backup my Mac via Time Mashine but I can't even find if this is supported on such a machine. It seems it is an NAS but without the being called a NAS, e.g. I haven't found anything about SMB or SFTP support.

tehabe 5y ago
I asked and no, this device does not support SMB or SFTP. So it is worthless for me.

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someonehere 5y ago

Considered this for home. Then asked myself, “what happens if they’re gone in five years? I’ll be looking for the next thing to replace this.” If Google or Apple made something like this, I’d bite. However I don’t know who these people are, how much runway they have left, life expectancy of the product, and how open and secure this is.

crawsome 5y ago

It’s a hard drive that requires a subscription it’s no different than another cloud service, actually they charge you more because they require their hardware.

tonoto 5y ago

But why another hardware appliance in the home? I'm turned off by having another hardware device at my home. If it instead was a turnkey solution or a virtual appliance, that I could put besides my already existing instances, that might catch my interest.