Last updated: May 12, 2026
We wanted to build things with AI without going broke. Cloud bills for hobby projects, side hustles, and internal tools are absurd. A Mac Mini sitting on your desk has more power than most cloud instances, costs nothing to run after you buy it, and never sends you a surprise invoice. So we built Mini — the missing piece that turns that box into a real server.
The cloud is incredible for companies at scale. But for indie developers, small teams, and people who just want to ship something — it’s overkill. You don’t need auto-scaling. You don’t need multi-region failover. You need a URL that points to your app, TLS that works, and deploys that take seconds. Instead you get YAML files, IAM roles, and a bill that grows every month whether you have users or not.
We believe the best infrastructure is the kind you own. We believe developers should be able to ship production services without a cloud account. We believe Apple Silicon changed the economics of self-hosting forever — server-grade performance at 5 watts idle. And we believe the tools to do this should be free, open-source, and simple enough that you can go from zero to production in under five minutes.
Mini is not a cloud replacement. It’s an alternative for people who don’t need one. One CLI command to deploy. Cloudflare Tunnels for networking. Docker Compose under the hood. No vendor lock-in, no subscription, no per-seat pricing. If you can plug in a Mac Mini and run a terminal command, you can host production services.
Mini is for developers who build side projects and want them to stay online without a monthly fee. For small teams who need internal tools but don’t need AWS. For AI tinkerers who want to run models and agents on their own hardware. For anyone who’s ever looked at a cloud bill and thought: I own a computer that could do this.
If you need 99.99% SLA guarantees, multi-region redundancy, or compliance certifications — use a cloud provider. Mini is honest about what it is: a single machine running in your home or office. It’s remarkably reliable, but it’s not a data center. We’d rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise.
Mini is MIT licensed and will stay that way. No open-core bait-and-switch. No premium tier waiting in the wings. We built this because we needed it, we open-sourced it because we think others do too, and we’ll keep improving it because we use it every day. The code is the product. Read it, fork it, make it yours.
We’re building Mini for a world where AI agents deploy their own services. Where a coding assistant can spin up an API, connect it to a database, and give it a public URL — all on hardware you own. The future of computing isn’t renting someone else’s machine. It’s making your own machine do more. That’s what Mini is for.