One question decides what a product becomes: who is it for?
File Orbit is for people who already pay for storage, internet, and who are tired of renting their memories back from a company. You should be able to keep photos and important files in more than one home you trust, and share a folder on purpose, not your whole library.
That mission is for three kinds of people. You might be more than one of them.
Network access storage. You already run an always-on box: a NAS, a homelab server, Unraid, TrueNAS, something that does not sleep when the laptop lid closes. You want another place for the files that matter, and you want it to feel like an app on that box, not a weekend of restoration docs. If the machine at your house dies, a copy at a sibling's place or on a desktop you trust should still open. When your box is back, it catches up.
Anti-big-tech. You have watched the bargain change. Storage looks cheap because the company is mining the library: ads, profiling, training, a terms page that moves. Google and Microsoft are the names. Slogans drift. A public study once showed a social network could push people's emotions around without telling them. The through-line is simpler than any one headline: you became the product. File Orbit will not do that. We also will not pretend we can beat those companies on cheap bulk gigabytes. This is a small shop. We charge so we do not make you the product.
Sovereignty. You may not be angry at a brand. You want to know who owns a file, who was allowed to hold a copy, and which home it lives on. A shared protocol is how that stays visible when the app changes, or when you leave. File Orbit is the product. Under it, sign-in and ownership use AT Protocol (the same family as Bluesky), and the bytes move on a private network between homes you choose. Home-to-home sync on hardware you control works with a login you already have. If you want us to run sign-in and ownership records for you, that is File Orbit login, and it is paid.
My job, this early, is to say that in plain English, and to keep the shop profitable without turning it into another place that needs your files to make the numbers work. I would rather learn who is actually here than spend life savings guessing.
What we measure
Shortly after the MVP I published the policies: privacy, terms, acceptable use, and the rest. They protect you, and they force the business to say what is tracked.
Product analytics on the marketing site is optional. We run it ourselves. It is Plausible, on our servers, not an ad network. If you accept it, we see anonymous page views and button clicks, and we remember which marketing page you landed on so a later download, signup, or purchase can be tied to that page. That note is not sold, and it is not shared with advertisers.
We ask before it starts. You can turn it off in the footer. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control turn it off. Opting out is allowed even when it makes marketing harder. Your files are not part of this. We do not mine libraries for ads, sell access to them, or train models on them.
The point of the measurement is narrow: which of these three audiences is adopting the tool. That answer will move, and the marketing should move with it.
Who we are building for right now
Right now the beachhead is network access storage. Container images are out, so you can self-host a Place on hardware you already leave on. Next is an Unraid Community App, so trying it is an install, not a compose tutorial.
If you want us to host the login, File Orbit Once is a one-time purchase for that operated sign-in. It is how the early infrastructure gets paid for. It is not required to sync homes you already trust with a login you already have.
The anti-big-tech and sovereignty readers are who I expect to tell us what "I know where my data is" has to mean before they will stay. I want that feedback. I do not want to pretend we already know which promise deserves the front door.
I will keep writing it down here as the mix changes.
Until next time,
~ Stephen Traiforos
File Orbit's Creator
If you want to know more about how the sauage is made checkout my personal blog. https://substratum.leaflet.pub/