i started holyclaude in march. a web ui for running claude on your own machine, built because i wanted one and the options at the time didn't fit how i worked. it's mit. i pushed it, used it every day, and mostly forgot it was public.
it's now at 2,478 stars and 257 forks. between it and my other project, holycode, there's roughly 132k docker pulls. people install it daily without me doing anything at all, which is still the strangest part of this whole thing.
this is what i've been building since, and why.
holyclaude runs on the machine it's installed on. that's the entire design and for a long time it was fine.
then i started leaving agents on longer tasks. builds, test suites, a refactor that touches forty files, anything that sits waiting on an api. and every one of those is a stretch of time where the sensible thing is to walk away from the computer.
so i'd start something, close the laptop, and come back to nothing. changing the sleep settings fixes the sleeping. it doesn't fix the work only ever existing on the machine in my bag.
there's a discussion open on the repo right now from a team running holyclaude on a shared vps. one container per developer, separate volumes, a shared git remote, access control handled entirely by tailscale.
that works. i want to be clear about that, because it's the honest answer for a lot of people and it costs nothing.
it's also a server somebody has to keep alive. patched, backed up, disk not full, certificates not expired, and awake at 3am when it stops answering. that maintenance is what i ended up building a product around, not the software.
a linux box that stays yours and stays on.
one firecracker vm and one persistent volume per person, running on fly. six agent clis already installed, claude code, codex, opencode, gemini, cursor and pi, plus around 60 dev tools so the box is useful the second it boots rather than after an afternoon of apt. root, ssh, and a browser terminal, so you can start something on a desktop and pick it up on a phone with the session still running.
your own api key. i don't proxy calls and i don't mark up tokens, which also means i never see what you're doing.
one detail that shaped the architecture more than anything else: holyclaude doesn't own its web ui. it ships cloudcli, which i package rather than wrote. so a feature like multi user login, which needs an auth layer inside the ui, means forking someone else's project and maintaining that fork forever. the hosted version runs a ui i wrote, with sso already in front of every box. that's why some things land there first. it's a dependency question rather than a commercial one, and i'd rather say that plainly than let people assume the free version is being starved.
selling infrastructure is not selling software. every user is a real vm that costs me about $13 a month whether they log in or not, so there is no free tier to grow into. that deletes half the standard playbook before you start.
the cost model has three lines, not two. the box is fixed. the model spend is variable. and retries are variable with no ceiling at all, which somebody pointed out in the comments of my last article and which i'd left out entirely. an agent stuck retrying the same failure overnight can outspend the machine it's running on without ever looking like it's failing.
fly refuses images over about 8gb, which i discovered by shipping a 13.6gb one. the deploy reported success, flyctl exited 0, and 95 seconds later the machine had quietly reverted to the previous image. the only trace was one line in the machine's own event list. exit code 0 means the api accepted your request, not that your machine is running your code.
and free stars don't convert. 132k pulls is flattering and it is not a funnel. the overlap between people who will install an mit project and people who will pay monthly for a hosted one is far smaller than a star count makes it feel.
sessions survive you disconnecting and survive me redeploying the box. they do not survive a hard restart, where you get a fresh shell. that one isn't solved.
every box sits behind an sso gate, so a stranger hitting a port gets a 401 rather than your terminal. proper cross tenant network isolation is on the list rather than done.
the 2gb entry tier will oom under a real build with a test suite next to it. 4gb is the first size that stopped annoying me.
and underneath all of it, it is a vps with the setup already done. if you enjoy running your own server, you genuinely don't need me.
the free one, forever: [https://github.com/CoderLuii/HolyClaude](https://github.com/CoderLuii/HolyClaude)
the hosted one, 3 days free: [https://app.holycode.cloud/billing?code=TRY3DAYS](https://app.holycode.cloud/billing?code=TRY3DAYS)
if you've taken a popular free project and put a paid version next to it, i'd like to know how you handled the line between them. that's the part i'm least sure i'm getting right.