You want to improve on your apps, so you fork an open source version or make your own. You want to access it from multiple devices, so it can’t just run locally. Cloud in a Bottle is a lightweight way to build and deploy personal apps on any hardware, including your own.
My existing CGM app wouldn’t let me scrub through my blood sugar history. So I built my own and easily hosted it on Cloud in a Bottle so I can access it from my phone.
An old laptop, a spare desktop, a Raspberry Pi. Runs directly on your machine or in a VM. Free - it’s your computer.
Rent a box from whoever you like, and turn it into your own personal cloud. You pay whatever your hosting provider charges; we don’t charge anything.
The easiest and fastest way to get going is get an instance managed by our team at Imbue. From $5/mo, $10 starter credit.
Matrix Synapse homeserver with a bundled Cinny web client. End-to-end encrypted messaging, owner single sign-on.
Self-hosted files, calendar, and contacts platform with sharing.
Free software media server for streaming your own movies, TV, music, and photos.
An alternative, open-source password manager server written in Rust that implements the Bitwarden API and works with the official Bitwarden client apps.
Obsidian-like collaborative markdown notes editor
Privacy-respecting metasearch engine that aggregates results from 70+ search services.
Network-wide ad blocker that blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level for every device on your network
A Free Software alternative to GitHub.
A self-hosted minecraft server runner
Self-hosted ChatGPT-style interface for local and remote LLMs (Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc).
Modern music server and streamer compatible with Subsonic/Airsonic clients.
Self-hosted uptime monitoring with HTTP, TCP, DNS, and ping checks and status pages.
A cloudinabottle.toml telling us how to serve your app. And a Dockerfile if you don’t already have one.
Paste it into your dashboard, or use our CLI. Your compute space clones the repo, builds the image, and starts the container.
bottle app deploy https://github.com/you/my-app
my-app.your-domain.com. No auth required in your app, it’s visible only to you unless you decide otherwise.
One command pulls your changes and reloads
bottle app reload my-app --update
A Python service that routes requests, builds and runs app containers, and serves the management dashboard.
Every app runs in its own security sandbox — a minimum-capability container running as an unprivileged user, with any additional access requiring your explicit permission. You can feel safer trying out vibe-coded or untrusted third-party apps without giving them more access than they need.
Apps can expose or consume data from other apps via the service interface, a fully permissioned and decentralized API for writing modular applications. Think Apple Health, but anyone can create the interfaces vs being stuck with whatever the platform defines.
App data and your instance’s state is all legible and lives in one well organized directory on disk. You can export this anytime, no lock-in. A backup and migration app comes pre-loaded on every instance.
I built Openhost because I was frustrated that we, as individuals, have lost control over the web. The web is where modern software lives, and open source or personal software has no home on the web. Open source authors don’t want to bear the cost of serving their app to the world, and individuals have no cloud real estate to host software on their own.
Cloud in a Bottle is in active development and licensed under AGPL-3.0. Issues and pull requests are welcome.