jonp

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!

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.

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.

Hi Seeg, Refund requests can be made by simply emailing support@hexos.com, but one of our moderators has already flagged your account for a refund.. The behaviors you are reporting are not due to HexOS or TrueNAS SCALE. We do not "exfil" your data in any way. We simply provide a management platform for your server through an API. We do not store copies of any of your data anywhere. The 900mbps sustained data transfer you are claiming is likely coming from a 3rd party application you installed or something else on your network. Otherwise I'd ask you to post any logs or evidence to support this claim so we can investigate further, as we do not see that behavior on any of our test systems or other reports from customers. It appears you used AI to write this post and I'm guessing it got a lot of things wrong that you weren't aware of. Not a problem, we will process a refund all the same. We don't want any unsatisfied customers. Thanks for giving us a try and we wish you luck on finding a better solution that meets your needs.

Yes. It simply ensures the install script being used is based on our latest curation. Eg with Plex/jellyfin updating the config detected the presence of a GPU and enables hardware transcoding.

Live fixes do not require users to perform any action locally. They hit our servers and affect everyone automatically. We will get you sorted through support. We are still tracking down why some reboots are losing connectivity to the deck. If you are comfortable with truenas UI, you can revert to a previous working boot by going to System > Boot and them clicking the activate icon on the right for the previous boot environment. Then restart.

Pushing a live hotfix right now that should address the majority of issues. For those experiencing problems, this should resolve them. If you are still stuck with specific apps, click options, reset, and try again. Still stuck? Email support@hexos.com so we can investigate further.

Fixes are inbound! We've been working on this since the first reports came in and believe we have identified the issues and are staging another hotfix deployment for later today.

We did deploy some hotfixes already but they were minor. The bigger issues are still being looked at by the team. We are on the trail of breadcrumbs now and should have most of this resolved soon. Thanks for everyone's patience and understanding.

We are investigating these issues. Thank you for reporting. I can confirm that when a curation gets updated, it can enable things like GPU transcoding. Our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused and we will work to right this in a future update.

Thanks for confirming and apologies to anyone that was confused. If anyone bought another license at $199 on accident today, send an email to support@hexos.com and we'll get the difference refunded.

@wvienna @FangerZero can you guys check again and let me know if the discount shows up correctly for you now?

No its not over. We are investigating why the correct pricing isn't showing up for users. Stand by.

It's on the teams short list for inclusion! I even posted on the Emby forums letting them know as well!!

This would require the app data folders themselves to be encrypted. Not impossible to do, but may not be with the first iteration of buddy backup. Definitely something we could consider!

OMG, I totally see the confusion now. I have edited that post and reworded it to be more clear. TrueNAS has no built-in means to do backups as part of their OS unless you consider rsync cron jobs/replication tasks as "backup". They don't facilitate the connection between servers or even setup the SSH permissions for you (you have to do all of that yourself). This is where our solution takes things a step further. We intend to make the experience much simpler. First you "friend" someone else that is a HexOS user (if you're doing the "buddy" approach). Then you will grant that user "permission" to backup to your system (and set a quota). Then they accept the request and authorize the backup in return (if you're doing that). Then we do the rest (establishing a secure VPN tunnel between systems, creating appropriate SSH users and handling the key exchange, etc.). You'll definitely be able to leverage the buddy backup system between two systems licensed under the same account. That would be silly of us to prohibit or unnecessarily complicate. I get the confusion. Buddy backup is just the marquee feature name for our backup solution between two servers. Every server needs a license. So if you and a buddy want to backup, you both have to have your own licenses under your own accounts. If you have two licenses for two systems under 1 account, you can use the same "buddy backup" system to handle that job as well. Apologies for muddying the water on my initial response. I can see how that had some folks confused, but I hope this clarifies.

Forgive me, but I'm really confused by what you're saying, which means there is clearly a disconnect in our marketing language and understanding with customers as well and I want to get to the bottom of that. Let's try some clarification here: Buddy backup is a feature that will allow two HexOS users (customers) to backup to each other's server in an encrypted fashion. There is no reason you cannot be your own buddy with a second license (e.g. you buy a second server license and put a server at a secondary location). If someone bought two licenses during black friday under two separate accounts, each account can backup to each other just the same (and if they want to merge those two accounts, we can handle that for the user). With this sale, however, we are not allowing someone to buy a second license to transfer to another user (as it would open the door to reselling licenses which we don't support). I get that the term "buddy backup" may not clearly identify that you can be your own buddy, but we thought it would be fairly obvious that if you could backup to someone else on a separate account, you could also backup to yourself on the same account. I think we could loosen the "encryption" requirement in the case of backups between two servers owned by the same account, but that's more of a technical detail than marketing. Let me know what's still unclear or how we can do better on the language here. Sometimes we can be a little too close to the trees to see the forest, so if you can help give us a better perspective, we'll work to improve our messaging in the marketing. Thanks!

Buddy backup will definitely work with two licenses under the same account. You will be your own buddy 😉

Fully acknowledge this isn't ideal but it is safe for now to take this approach. We will address updating your curation in place in the future.

Yes most definitely! We have the underpinnings for a language selector already in place, but we're deferring translation work until after 1.0.

As of today, yes, you can access your server from anywhere using deck.hexos.com. I have a discussion planned with the team to allow you to disable remote access which would be as simple as us verifying the WAN IP of the client device being used to connect to the deck and making sure it matches the server's WAN IP. When HexOS Local arrives, you will be able to even further reduce your cloud dependency, but there are some features like installing apps/VMs, configuring buddy backups, and e-mail notifications that will require a connection to our deck. Thankfully that connection is outbound from your server, which doesn't require you to open any ports on your firewall and expose the system to the wider net. We also do have plans to implement oAuth and 2FA in the future to further enhance security and options.

Absolutely. That is 100% doable.

We know about this problem all-too-well. The VM features will come in layers, but our plan is to try and get ahead of those kinds of problems by detecting hardware changes and automatically adjusting device ID mappings to your VMs before they start. This still needs a lot of R&D work and there are lots of potential gotchas, but I bet we can address a lot of common scenarios like what you've described. It gets more tricky when you have multiple GPUs in a system of the same make/model, as it's hard to know which one is which for assignment to VMs. I'd say that's a problem for after the initial VMs feature release for us to investigate further. Ultimately there will be some limits to what we can do, but we're going to do this as best as is humanly possible.

Correct. The additional licenses is for users that want to setup multiple systems of their own, not for buddy backups. @Todd Miller rightly called this out as confusing. What I meant to say is that you just can't transfer the license to another user. You can use buddy backups (as a feature) between two systems that you own and control (licensed under one account). Sorry for the confusion! Carry on!