If we did, would you be comfortable giving the company a root SSH login to manage your system, or would you prefer a more limited method of access?

There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

Agreed, it would need to be very clear, and additionally we'd need to plan that a certain percentage of customers would grow out of a basic support offering, either by becoming experts or by growing their install size and complexity.

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal.

Understandable. Is there a price you think would be reasonable? What would you want for that price?

Would you rather pay a higher price per single instance ($100 to fix something you broke on accident) or pay a lower constant price ($10-$20/month) like insurance?

Would you rather get help in the form of a conversation, a custom script someone wrote for you, or by giving admin access to the company to directly fix things?

Do you already have an idea of what kinds of things you'd want to run on it?

These are great points, and I fully agree. I'd be interested in knowing what kind of license or corporate structure or contract would give you confidence that the organization is worth investing in. I could put all the software out with a really strong Affero license so that you've got the source code, but I get the impression that you, like me, want more than that. Corporations like Mondragon are interesting to me, and I'm aware of a few different tech cooperative organizations. I'm not confident that a cooperative structure alone is enough. Yes, it helps avoid the company taking VC money, shooting for the moon, failing, and then selling everything that's not clearly legally radioactive. But it doesn't protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital and adjusting the EULA every few months until they have the right to sell off your baby photos.

I've been batting around the idea of creating a compliment to the "end-user license agreement" - the "originating company license agreement". Something like a poison pill that forces the company to pay out to customers in the event of a data breach, sale of customer data, or other events that a would-be acquirer may think is worth it for them.

I'm just not sure yet what kinds of controls would be strong enough to convince people who have been burned by this sort of thing in the past. What do you think?

That's an interesting idea I hadn't thought much about. I've been more focused on individuals than organizations. Do you have experience with tax-funded institutions? I assumed they generally have strict procurement rules and long support contracts with large established players by policy.

Good point, I should have mentioned the plan is to sell support.

I assume "SFF PC" means "Small form-factor personal computer".

The value add is not having to make a large number of technical decisions. IPv4 vs v6, which firewall rules to use, port-forwarding vs DMZ, flavor of Linux, partition scheme, filesystem type, application packaging system, and on and on. For many people they don't care about these decisions, they want "to put something on the Internet" and do it safely. While safety isn't a binary, and engineering is full of tradeoffs, an experienced practitioner can answer many of these questions reflexively and come out with good enough answers for some customers.

In the end the customer should be able to dig in and change whatever they want. But I want to see if flipping the decision dependency around will help. IE, start with stuff that works, then change things, rather than start with parts and make all the decisions before anything works.

If it came bundled around a bunch of DIY guides explaining the hows and the whys, it’d be far more appealling

Interesting, so if you got hardware and it came with guides, what kind of guides would you want? I would assume something layered. At the top is just "I want to install these 5 apps and use them, I don't care how it works" and in the middle is "I'm ready to SSH into the router and create some VLANs for fun" at the bottom is something like "I want to flash my own firmware with appropriate certificates for secure boot and my own root chain of trust on the server hardware".

How will you provide long term maintenance of their server for a one time payment of 150$?

My current thinking is the margin on the hardware would be intentionally low, essentially the cost of the hardware %+10 for configuring it a bit, installing NixOS, etc.

The business would survive on support and hosted services. Something like $20/month which gets you access to support to answer questions, help configure applications, troubleshoot issues, etc. Possibly rolling upgrades of your installed software on your behalf. Alerts on urgent security vulnerabilities. Could also handle tricky things like custom DNS (email servers, certificates) and off-site backups. I'm not totally sure what all would be included, but the goal is to make money while providing value, not build a garden or rent-seek.

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product. ... The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

I think this is a great point, it doesn't help much to create a business that ends up with the same incentives and the same end-game as the existing systems.

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.

That is precisely what I'm looking to build. I don't want to get rich, I want people without 10 years of industry experience to get some of the benefits we have all been able to build for ourselves.

Which problem(s) are you trying to solve? The networking issue of firewalls and port forwarding?

Within the scope of this question, yes. Also properly configuring IPv6, though that's just to achieve the same things that port forwarding enables.

The admin tasks of installing and configuring applications?

That's also on my list, but I was trying to keep the question focused. Do you think the answer makes a difference? In other words, if it was just networking would it be not worth it, but networking and application management would make it worth it?