the personal compute fabric
You've probably got an old laptop in a drawer, a NAS (one of those little boxes of hard drives) humming in a cupboard, maybe a cheap cloud server you keep forgetting to cancel. Each one sits there mostly idle. Meanwhile you're paying someone else to host your side projects.
Orchy is what we at Earnest Ventures built to fix that. It joins the computers you already own into one small cloud of your own. We call that group of computers your orchy, and the idea a Personal Compute Fabric. On this page you'll see what it does, what it doesn't, and how to try it in about a minute.
Want to poke at one first? "Try it live" lets this browser tab join an orchy we keep open to the public, as a guest. You don't install anything.
Use what you've already got: laptops, a home server, a rented cloud box. One command links them over a private, encrypted network that only your devices can join. We call it the mesh. (The technique is mutual TLS, or mTLS: both ends prove who they are before they talk.)
An app nobody's using can go to sleep (you switch that on per app). When someone visits, Orchy wakes it before they notice.
Your data lives on at least 2 devices. If one dies, say the laptop takes a coffee to the keyboard, the app starts on another with its data.
The front door is where visitors from the internet arrive. Yours is secret: your devices open a connection outwards (a tunnel) to a company that passes visitors along it. Cloudflare, Tailscale and ngrok all offer one. So you skip the usual, riskier step of opening ports on your router.
Most hosting keeps every app running all day, even the blog that gets three visits a week. That's like leaving every light in the house on. With Orchy an idle app switches off. The next visitor arrives at the front door, Orchy starts the app in a few milliseconds, and they get their page. The request just waits those few milliseconds.
orchy deploy nats:2.10-alpine. And it'll keep that app's data in your orchy: orchy deploy postgres:16-alpine --volume data:/var/lib/postgresql/data.Download Orchy, run one command, and you can have your first app live in about a minute. We're Earnest Ventures, and we run this very website on it.