Your own private cloud, made simple.

Short answer: no — if you go with a cloud server.

Longer answer: it depends on where MOS lives. A rented cloud server just means following our step-by-step guide, which includes a full video walkthrough of the whole install — no experience needed.

Your own hardware needs a little more: download the installer image from our latest release, write it to a USB stick, and boot the machine from it. Writing the stick needs a free utility — Rufus on Windows, which is a single file you run without installing, or balenaEtcher elsewhere. There's nothing else to set up, and no prompts to answer during the install — but you do need a spare machine you're willing to wipe, and you'll be the one plugging in cables. If that sounds like a hassle rather than a Saturday, a cloud server is the easier place to start.

Either way, once MOS is running everything happens in the browser and works for anyone.

MOS and every app in the catalog are free and open source — no license keys, no subscriptions, no paid tier.

The only real cost is the computer it runs on: a little electricity if you use a machine at home, or a small monthly fee for a rented cloud server (about $20–25 a month for the tested reference size). A one-click managed hosting option is coming for people who'd rather pay MOS to run it all for them.

On the machine you installed MOS on — your home mini-PC or your cloud server. MOS never routes your data through a MOS-owned cloud, and the platform contains no telemetry at all: no account, no analytics, nothing reporting back to us. We don't know that you installed it.

The one exception is this marketing page, which counts anonymous visits using analytics we run ourselves. The docs have none, and your suite has none. The privacy policy spells out every connection your server makes.

Each app updates on its own schedule, independently of MOS itself. Your server periodically checks a signed catalog for newer app versions and shows an Update available badge — so a security fix for your password manager reaches you without waiting for a MOS release.

Nothing updates behind your back. You see what changes — new settings, breaking changes, whether the privacy assessment moved — and you press the button. If an update fails, MOS puts the app back the way it was, or tells you exactly what it couldn't undo.

Yes. Paste a GitHub repository URL into the Apps search and MOS will fetch it, check it, and show you what it wants before anything is installed — which addresses it asks for, which storage, which other apps it wants to reach.

It's labelled External · Unverified everywhere it appears, because we haven't reviewed it and we won't pretend otherwise. Building it runs the publisher's own instructions on your server, so it's genuinely your call — MOS's job is to make sure it's an informed one.

Everything runs on standard open-source apps with standard data formats. Manual whole-suite backups go to an encrypted USB drive on own hardware or a mounted block-storage volume on a cloud server. Bundles are not encrypted by MOS, so the destination must be protected like the server itself.

MOS is version 0.17.0 and improving quickly. Every change runs an automated test suite before it lands, the whole install-to-apps flow is exercised on real virtual machines, and every image is pinned to an exact digest. The changelog is public.

Trust is the product, so here's the honest part: pre-1.0 releases can include breaking changes, and we don't yet run the full end-to-end suite automatically on every release. Treat MOS as ready for evaluation and non-critical use for now: keep an independent backup of anything you can't afford to lose, and take a backup before you update — the button is right there.