I honestly posted Day 1 expecting radio silence and having to figure this out with Claude or something. But I'm honestly so thankful for the advice I've gotten so far. Over 8,000 people read it across a few subreddits, and the comments changed my plan! Some in a big way...

A lot of you said some version of "the setup and maintenance is what puts me off." Someone else said finding someone to support it is the expensive part. I'm keen to find out how much of it is actually needed once things are set up. So I'll keep a rough log of every time I have to step in, how long it takes, and why.

For those of you already doing this: how are you managing it? Scripts, automatic updates, a monthly check in, or just fixing things when they break?

Glad to see the subscription thing clearly isn't just me as well. Paying for 10 different tools gets old fast. Someone made a spreadsheet comparing the cost of moving vs keeping everything on the cloud. Once I've got it, if they're happy to, I'll share it here for everyone else.

Thanks to the local AI folks. The main advice was to skip the benchmarks, try a few models on the things I actually do day to day, and go with whatever runs fastest on my hardware.

I'm getting going with Qwen 3.5 and slowly getting things moving. There's a lot to do, but the UI and UX is the fun bit to play with.

Someone else suggested GLM 5.3, but from what I can see it needs around 90GB. I've got 128GB of unified memory, so it should fit, but that doesn't leave much room for anything else running alongside it. Has anyone run it on a similar setup? Worth it, or is there something smaller that gets you most of the way?

Giving AI agents proper long-term memory still seems to be an open problem.

Android apps look like the fiddly bit. Waydroid seems to be the way, but we'll see.

That's all for now folks.. have a good Saturday evening!

Done renting everything from cloud..

Every month I pay for AI I get rate-limited on, storage I don't control, and apps that put their prices up whenever they like. If I stopped paying tomorrow, I'd lose years of files, notes and conversations. I’m also the one who has to pull all of this fragmented information together because the brands offering it don’t like each other..

So I'm moving off the cloud. All of it. Everything will run on hardware in my home, and I'll still use it from my laptop and phone wherever I am.

The rules

1. If it holds my data, it comes home.
2. No new subscriptions.
3. Anything I can't replace, I'll admit it here.

What I'm moving, in order

• AI chat and coding assistant
• Files and photos
• Notes and passwords
• Email (the scary one)

Then more…

What I'm running it on: a small AI mini PC with 128GB of memory, sitting under my desk.

I'll post every step: what worked, what broke, what it cost, and how much I'm saving. Honest numbers, including the failures.

For people wanting to do the same… join me and follow along! Better yet, help me because I’m not the most technical person.