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First, let me start by saying I actually really appreciate this question and I hope my answer gives you faith in our long-term sustainability, exactly as you mention in the title of this thread. The lifetime license model is appropriate for a very particular type of customer with very specific priorities: Bring your own hardware Doesn't want an ongoing subscription Will mostly support themselves It was the appropriate model to launch with as well because it allowed us to inject a larger cash infusion at the start. However, we see multiple additional revenue streams available to us in the future: Subscription-based licensing. A lower price of entry for customers that aren't ready to make the lifetime commitment. Support. A more premium support model that can help you on a 1:1 basis when you have issues with your server. Cloud-based Services. Things like cloud backups (as an alternative or in addition to buddy backup). There are other cloud-assisted services such as reverse-proxy/relay that may warrant a subscription as well. Hardware products We will never force anyone to buy a specific hardware product to use HexOS, but we may offer some for those that don't want to build their own in the future. We actually have a few other ideas for additional offerings as well that would add additional revenue streams to Eshtek, but those are a little premature to discuss at this point. Bottom line: we don't just have a product plan, we have a full business plan for the future of this company and it has been designed to ensure a few key things: We don't run out of cash. We don't have to take on outside investors. We can remain true to our mission and vision. I hope this answers your question and gives you more confidence in our plans for the future. And if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Hey, The quickest check which you can do; when you connect a display to your server, what IP address is shown? 10.0.0.28 or a different one?

Hey, that is a nice setup and will allow you to run a lot of stuff on your server 🙂 Some things to consider: You can only us the boot drive for the OS, 32GB are more then enough, 500GB are overkill, but you can still use it with 2 drives, Hexos will create a mirrored pool, which means you will have the capacity of 1 drive (4TBs in your case) and you can lose 1 drive. Additionally a mirrored Pool cannot be extended. If you want to have the possibility to extend the pool in the future, you need to have at least 3 drives now to create a RaidZ1. A RaidZ1 can be extended with additional drives in the future and you will have the capacity of your smallest drive * (the number of drives - 1) Your Motherboard has a Realtek NIC, which have a tendency to not work well or at all with Hexos. It's a new 5Gbps NIC which might work better, but keep this in mind if you face network issues. Hexos is an awesome, easy to use OS and offers exactly what you need to get started. It offers both Plex and Jellyfin as 1 click install apps, so that you have the choice what you want to use. It also offers other popular apps as 1 click installs and more apps will be supported in the future.

Hello @jonp, I really appreciate your detailed response. Thanks a lot.

I'm personally hoping there is some consulting in the mix as well. I man above what would be deem to be general support issues. For instance, every app I run is accessed by HTTP not HTTPS. I would love someone to point me to suitable options that would help secure my system. And as an example, and only an example, it could dramatically increase my satisfaction with HexOS without actually making any changes to the core product. And if they develop a great solution for someone they can make it available for anyone who needs it either as contract work or as an addon service. It can all mesh together improving my experience and many others overall.

I signed up as an early adopter last November, but have not yet installed it (running TrueNAS on an IXSystems Mini 3.0X+ w/a 5x8TB RAIDZ1) I'm building a custom NAS (probably overkill, this is all homelab stuff) now (parts slowly arriving) CPU: Intel 14500 I5 RAM: 128GB DDR4 (ouch!!!!) Mobo: ASUS B760M-A D4-CSM Supermicro 2U chassis 7x12TB (will be a RAIDZ2) with an HBA card and SAS extender in case I want to add more than the 8 drives the chassis supports 1TB Samsung 990 Pro NVME (boot drive, and planning on putting my VMs there, or at least the fast ones I need, w/backup to the big vdev) Intel A380 (hoping it'll work) for transcoding dual 10GBps NIC for connecting to my backbone I'll be reading a ton in the next week here 🙂 ~Horist

Hello. Thanks for writing us. We currently don't have a student program but please reach out next year and we hopefully will have a program in place. Try to save your allowance up as it's going to be more than $5 but a lot less than the $299 it will be at that time. Good luck with your studies. HexOS Team

For us to dig deeper, I'd like you to report back with your hardware configuration as well as confirm what version of the OS you are running (25.10.1 or earlier?). There were some issues with the TrueNAS SCALE network reporting graphs in earlier releases. We'd also like to see a packet cap or something more than just a domain to prove what you're claiming here. Maybe wireshark monitor? Did you configure anything within TrueNAS SCALE's UI itself at any point or did you just utilize the HexOS dashboard for all your needs? Lots of things could account for the disk activity itself (such as background tasks or maintenance operations like the scrub that happens by default once a month) but the network activity is not us. StorJ is the used by TrueCloud if you configure your server to use it for backups (not something we support via HexOS today at all). Furthermore, the storj connection and the websocat connections are independent of each other. Websocat is used to make an outbound connection from a HexOS server to our Command Deck as outlined in one of our earlier blog posts here: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2024-07-30.html. That's it. We do not and cannot transfer your data via that connection. The entirety of that connection is to give us API access to manage your system via our interface at deck.hexos.com. This ties back to something in TrueNAS and not anything with HexOS. Once you've unclaimed your system, we no longer have any access to do anything with your system. Generally speaking, it was quite an alarmist post and makes some pretty aggressive claims about data being "exfiltrated", that we were "misleading" about our product, and that you haven't seen any "meaningful updates." This was stated in our very first blog post that I previously linked but you won't by reliant on deck.hexos.com for long: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-11-25.html. Furthermore, having a management interface hosted via cloud doesn't go against self-hosting as a concept. All of your data and applications are still running local on your LAN, which gives you the value of self-hosting. Management interactions for most customers are limited to initial setup of storage, folders, users, and applications. Once running, users mostly just interact with the applications and data, which run entirely local. Ultimately we want to know if this is a real bug/issue that ties back to TrueNAS SCALE so we can escalate to the right people or if this is simply a misunderstanding or misconfiguration. In reviewing multiple test systems we have configured and going back over a month in the network reporting, we see no significant network activity that matches anything close to what you are reporting.

For this, the fix was to in HexOS go into Settings > Reset > Unclaim System. Then reclaim the server and it should be fine. From what I can tell it gets like that because when you reclaim the server before restoring the config backup in TrueNAS the API key is different than what HexOS has so when you reclaim the server it checks and see the API key in TrueNAS and uses that. Sidenote if you are importing your config file back into TrueNAS for the apps if they are gone and nothing happens after you set the pool, try unsetting (unset pool) then select the pool again it and then it takes a bit to run through the HDDs and bam it comes back.

I ran into the same problem, and this fixed it. I think the install script for HexOS for this app needs to be modified slightly. Made a data set in the home-assistant folder, give it a name like "config" or "data", and modify the "Host Path" for "Home Assistant Config Storage" to be in that new dataset. Now I need to look at how to remove a bunch of junk from a folder without removing the datasets I want.

I... I was... I would have.... FUUUUUUUU-- Ordinarily, I would absolutely have tried another USB, and I actually was trying a bit ago, but that drive was being funky and wouldn't connect to Windows well and I gave up. I completely overlooked trying Balena Etcher (Rufus has always been rock solid for me so I never bother thinking aoub it) but NOW THAT YOU'VE SAID IT I feel like I remember needing to use it for CORE back in the day TOO! I am an IDIOT! Anyway, I grabbed a third USB, Etcher, and a new copy of the .iso, and set it all up again, and wouldn't you know it, the damn thing worked. Installed HexOS to the SSD, plugged in the HDDs and went to boot, and the box picked up the data drives to boot to. I thought I wasn't out of the weeds yet, but on a whim I tried re-enabling the B120i and going in and deleting the RAID array on the drives but keeping the single "array" on the SSD, which allows me to set the logical array as bootable in the B120i. Rebooted and... LOOK! HexOS!! I am as much at fault as any part of the technology in this thread, but in the end, through all that crap, and with your help, we got there, so... THANK YOU very much!!

Hey, please keep us posted about the progress. Concerning why you shouldn't use a HW Raid in combination with Truenas, the official ZFS documentation has a great section about this you find it here: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance and Tuning/Hardware.html#hardware-raid-controllers

Hey, You changed the Truenas GUI ports, that's the problem. The Hexos button is pointing to the port 443 (https) or 80 (http) but nothing on the server is listening at that port thus the rejection. You currently cannot change the destination ports of the truenas gui button in Hexos. To keep its functionality, you need to revert back to the ports 80/443. If you want to keep your custom ports, bookmark the page in your browser 🙂

Hey it would be cool to have a straight forward way to install Nextcloud (e.g. the all in one edition https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-to-install-the-nextcloud-all-in-one-on-linux/) on HexOS. I set it up myself on my homelab, but the setup was not as easy and while the software itself works great, I'm not as satisfied with my implementation. It offers a lot of features with a client that is available on a lot of devices already, essentially substituting Cloud storage, Google Calender, Contacts, Office products, Slack (e.g. for small businesses) and as I just saw even LLM like ChatGPT. This would add huge additional value to HexOS, since you easily could substitute a lot of subscriptions that way, while having enormous privacy benefits, a thing the target audience of HexOS would surely profit of. Especially if there is also a way to safely expose it to the internet.

Next cloud has already been curated by HexOS

With all the other apps curated so far it would be awesome to see nginx curated for DNS and HTTPS resolving. It already exists in truenas scale as Nginx Proxy Manager. This would allow hex os users to access their apps externally without VPN hosting, to resolve DNS requests and utilize https.

this is correct however there is one more limitation, only pools that consist of 3 or more storage drives can be expanded. 2 drive pools have no option for expansion 3+ drive pools can be expanded with drives of the same or larger capacity of the smallest drive in the pool yes if you have a pool that has 4 drives you can add another later to increase the pool size, giving you more space

Forgot to update when I did this, but replaced my 8TB drives w/ 24GB ones when they were on sale. Glad I went for it since those drives are MUCH more expensive now.

So, I built twin HexOS systems (almost) in Jonsbo N5's 1 Ryzen 9 9900X (12C/24T) and 1 Ryzen 7 9700X (8C/16T) 1 RTX 4070 TI and 1 RTX 3070 For both: MSI Mag X870E Tomahawk 96GB DDR5 Boot - Crucial P310 1TB in Raid 1. Storage - 4 x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 4TB RaidZ1 1000w Modular PSU PCIE X8 SAS card and onboard to connect all 12 bays in the N5 Intel X550T2 Dual 10GbE NIC Full case fan replacement with Nocuta fans and a NH D15 cooler. Mirrored backups between the system over Tailscale and one machine moved from my house to the workshop 30mins away for offsite actual a backup backup. Too much? ETA- I built them in August last year, before things got...too crazy

This fixed my issue I was having with HA, thank you! 🙏

So i decided to build a NAS to rip my movie collection and to tinker with some future projects when i have the time to learn about VM and AI I have a 9950x i got from a friend and 64gb of ram i bought 2 years ago for 340 dollars can you believe it i miss those times A used 5060ti 16gb found for cheap so i said to myself why not build a NAS it will be nice project during my free time. So i bought ASUS ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming motherboard , i have an old m.2 500gb for the os another 2tb nvme ssd for apps or whatever and i have two 4tb hdd laying around and i wanted something easy to use as the OS My question is what is the best approach for this build should i go for the hexOS and if yes how should i configure the ssd's to avoid any issues and i'm planning to add more hdd in the future once i figure out how to use a NAS Keep in mind I'm just a simple PC gamer never tired something like that, I'm a NAS and networking virgin. Thank you in advance any advice will help.

Hey, Unfortunately Hexos does not offer the possibility to use any drive as a write cache, you can only use it as a read only cache drive, which only offers a benefit in particular use cases and streaming isn't one of them. You can use your current 500GB drive for the OS it's just a lot of wasted space. But if that's what you have and don't want to spent ridiculous amount of money for a new lower size SSD, go with the 500GB one. You don't necessarily need a new NIC, it's just possible that your current will not work, but not a certainty. Some of the newer Realtek NICs work fine. Give it a go and only buy a new NIC if yours isn't working or causing issues.

https://www.gingerling.co.uk/how-easy-is-hexos-to-resurrect-when-youve-ignored-it-for-3-months-because-you-had-a-new-boyfriend/ Enjoy 🙂 Ax

I really appreciate all of your help. Thank you so much!!!

Hi, I’m one of the happy lifetime license holders for HexOS, and overall, I’m really excited about where the project is headed. But there’s one thing I’m worried about: long-term sustainability. I get that selling lifetime licenses is great for upfront cash flow, but how do you plan to keep the project financially healthy in 5 or 10 years? Honestly, it reminds me a bit of what is happening with Plex, and that’s kind of worrying. For the same reason, I’ll never buy services like pCloud with “lifetime” storage. I assume you have a strategy for this—maybe optional subscription services (like cloud backup, premium/enterprise support, etc.). Could you share a bit about it? Are you confident that these income streams will be enough? Even though I’ve already paid for my license, this actually affects my decision about whether to start my main server on HexOS. Long-term viability matters more to me than the initial cost, to be honest. I’m not trying to be critical—just looking for some clarity to feel more confident about the future. Thanks for any insights!

I think having a curated app for Matrix could be huge for HexOS since it could be a great and easy replacement for Discord.

At this time we are only curating applications that are available on the truenas app catalog and seems like matrix/synapse is not on the catalog at this time. I suggest you reach out to the developer of the app and request they submit their app to the truenas app catalog. Instructions on how they can do so can be found at https://github.com/truenas/apps/blob/master/CONTRIBUTIONS.md

Title says it all. Thanks.

Every time I update Hexos to latest version the website stops working. I can still login via TrueNAS but hexos is broken.

can you try doing this

Any plans to implement Kiwix serve? Being able to host Wikipedia locally (through .zim file) would be great. https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Kiwix-serve It’s the only feature left that would remove my barrier to switching my current setup to hexos.

Update: I think I was able to get to the bottom of it. A while ago, after upgrading the server, I set a bunch of power efficiency options in BIOS to minimise the hardware impact on the power bill. However, it seems these settings may impact the system stability at high loads, which is what I've been experiencing. I also played around with the EXPO profile a little bit since I've seen system instability with some stock profiles in the past.

I am not able to check it myself at the moment. But I would recommend you to attach a display and a keyboard to your server, also your USB with the OS. When you restart the server it should tell you a way to stop the boot sequence and enter your BIOS. From the BIOS you can set the USB as your boot device and then restart the server again. Now it should boot into the HexOS install sequence where it will reinstall everything from scratch, and you can decide whether or not you want to wipe your HDD/SSD pools. I recommend you to get the newest HexOS ISO file and put that on your USB before you go through this process 🙂

We push updates out now in the UI/UX itself too every time we do one. Check your notifications.

Oh and regarding this: You can unclaim your system from the Settings -> Reset page without losing any data.

I did miss this before I got around to it. I ended up reinstalling. I was able to migrate all my data off since it was in read only to save my self a headache of reorganizing all of it, then set it back up and moved data back onto it. This time I took a trueNAS backup so this cannot happen again. Thank you for your time and help!

Hello, not sure if it was requested already, but a curation for the "Actual Budget" app would be greatly appreciated. I found it by looking at the apps tab, and did some more research on it and i would love to switch to it instead of my current app of Quicken since I pay yearly to use it. I think it would help many nowadays due to inflation. Thanks!

+1 is there any plans regarding ARM as of today ?

Would be great if we could get ente photos support just like immich. I tried to set it up myself but couldn't. Here's the link: https://ente.io/help/self-hosting/

Hello, It seems the after the update some systems on reboot are reaching out to our server so it doesn't know your there. Try the following. Login to TrueNAS interface. Left side select "system". Then after screen refreshes select "shell" from the list. Paste in the following command. Can't use normal short cuts Will need to use Shift + Insert Key for pasting. sudo python /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/middlewared/scripts/vendor_service.py If that works within about 1 min you should be able to go to deck.hexos.com and see your server or claim it.

I also would love to see paperless ngx curated!

I would like to see first party support for placing any app behind some of the most popular VPNs (PIA, Nord, Express, Proton, Tailscale, etc), as well as custom VPNs (WireGuard, OpenVPN, etc). For example, you may install “The Lounge” IRC client and have all internet communication pass through a PIA VPN so that your home IP is not exposed while chatting. Traditional methods of doing this involve painful configuration of iptables or other firewall rules. I believe this is an area where HexOS could really simplify things: Install a VPN plugin, authenticate with it, and then simply assign an app to a VPN plugin via the app’s settings if desired. It would be fully accessible from the home network without going through the VPN, but all internet traffic would go through the VPN with a kill switch in case the VPN goes down. Thoughts?

Def not cloud only. If your isp/network supports peer to peer, we can coordinate that and then get out of the way. That is what's included in a lifetime license. If we end up having to relay traffic for some users, that will require a subscription as we will have to pay for the relay traffic, but obviously it will still be encrypted.

Hey, No this has been fixed months ago, with the Q1 update I believe.

I’ve changed the default port numbers on my TrueNAS web server to free up ports 80 and 443 for other services. However, from the HexOS portal, it still tries to connect using the standard ports when interacting with TrueNAS. For example, if I try to edit an app’s configuration or launch the TrueNAS configuration from the portal, I don’t get the correct interface. It would be great if the portal could detect the configured port numbers via the API, or allow these to be set manually in the HexOS settings.

Fyi, Q3 update went live today along with a new docs site: docs.hexos.com We are listening to you guys!

Agreed. When creating a VPN connection, have options to route specific apps with this connection, or the whole system, or whole system but exclude specific apps.

The more powerful hardware you use the more your electric bill will be. I would go with an Intel cpu to use Quick sync for your plex streams. It allows you to get away with using a less power hungry cpu. I would suggest any intel cpu that has a UHD 700 igpu. It will handle multiple 4k streams. The intel i5 12500 is a 65w cpu and can be bought new for $175 on Amazon US. The 12600k is on sale for $150 on Amazon US but is a 125w cpu. You can find better deals if you search /r/hardwareswap on reddit or search on ebay. Then grab the cheapest Z790 or B760 chipset motherboard that fits your needs/budget. With this CPU you can choose to get a motherboard that uses either DDR4 or DDR5.