Why Self-Host
Self-hosting Engram isn’t the default — cloud is faster, easier, and cheaper for most people. Self-host when you have a reason that outweighs the operational cost. (For the broader product philosophy behind why self-host exists at all, see Why Engram.) A few real reasons people pick self-host:
Data sovereignty
Section titled “Data sovereignty”Your notes never leave your infrastructure. The vault, the index, the embeddings, the search engine, everything runs on hardware you own (or rent in a region you trust). Useful for regulated industries, research environments, or anyone with strict compliance needs.
Larger vaults than cloud tiers support
Section titled “Larger vaults than cloud tiers support”The cloud tiers cap vault size to keep the service affordable for everyone. Self-hosting removes that cap — you pay for compute and storage as it scales. If you have a multi-gigabyte vault, self-host is usually the right call.
Local embeddings via Ollama
Section titled “Local embeddings via Ollama”Self-host can run Ollama as the embedding provider, keeping embedding generation fully on-device. No data leaves your machine to get vectorized. Useful when you want zero third-party calls in the data path.
Lab and homelab use
Section titled “Lab and homelab use”You already have a homelab. Engram on a small VM next to your existing services is a few minutes of setup. Compose file, env vars, done.
What you give up
Section titled “What you give up”- Operations — you patch, monitor, back up, upgrade. Engram is designed to be easy to operate but it’s still software you own.
- Hosted billing — no Paddle integration, no per-user subscriptions. (You can still run it for a team, just without billing plumbing.)
- Some integrations — Clerk-backed user management is cloud-only. Self-host uses local auth.
If you read the above and self-host still sounds right, head to Quickstart.