Get off the subscription treadmill.
Own your stuff again.

Sovereign compute appliances that run on hardware you control — not someone else's cloud. Your data stays home. Your decisions stay yours. The thing you paid for keeps working the day the company decides to stop supporting it.

Talk to Skylar See the Products

The platform, not the hardware.

Bitstead is software that runs on whatever you already have, or on a flagship box when you want turnkey. Start where you are. Grow when you're ready. No subscription to think for it. No terms of service to lock you out.

The whole point isn't to make you buy our stuff — it's to make you stop renting yours.

Seed

The foot-in-the-door. A small, fanless box that joins your home WiFi and runs the Bitstead platform locally. Onboards your old phone as a camera, your old laptop as a compute node, your old drive as storage. No maker skills required — scan a QR, it works.

Starts with WiFi + LoRa. Add a HaLow HAT later when you want long-range coverage. Same firmware, no rip-and-replace.

WiFi LoRa Fanless QR onboarding

Indri

The full nervous system. Ships with HaLow long-range mesh, WiFi, and LoRa — ready to handle cameras, sensors, and off-site nodes from day one. For surveillance, remote property coverage, mesh extending, and the things you need to keep working when the internet doesn't.

HaLow + WiFi + LoRa by default. Pairs with Seed for VLAN isolation or just to expand your range when your property outgrew WiFi. Multi-antenna. Solar-ready.

HaLow WiFi LoRa Mesh Solar-ready

Bring your own hardware (Mac Mini, old PC, Raspberry Pi) and plug it into the Bitstead platform. Or choose a flagship model designed for your specific use case. Either way, the dashboard lives on your device and your data stays home.

Your smart home doesn't die when the internet does.

Ring cameras are bricks when Comcast blips. Smart locks that need cloud are a liability during storms. Bitstead devices talk over their own mesh — even when internet and cell service go down.

Tornado warning? Kids still get your "get to the basement" message. Power outage? Your ecosystem still sends alerts. Cell towers down? LoRa mesh still reaches your devices.

When your ecosystem ties together, every device becomes part of a redundant emergency network. Not because you bought a satellite — because your hardware already talks to each other.

The accessory ecosystem.

The platform extends through accessories you snap on. Start with Seed, grow into Indri. Plug in cameras, sensors, compute modules — whatever your ecosystem needs.

Twocan

Camera-as-sensor, not streamer. Local AI does object detection and sends text alerts. Video feed works when bandwidth allows; smart notifications work always. Works over LoRa when internet's down. Includes "Solaris" variant for outdoor / weatherproof deployment.

Keychain Dongle

Portable LoRa access point with NFC/QR. Reach your Bitstead ecosystem from off-site during outages or when you're away from home. SOS, emergency alerts, or just "close the shades" — over LoRa, no internet required.

E-Paper Labels

Every device gets a tiny label that looks like a printed sticker — until it wakes up. Low-power, no LED glow, no 24/7 failure points. Displays QR + NFC + wake-up instructions. Sleek, minimal, and just enough information to onboard the next device.

AI Compute Modules

Plug-in compute units for local inference. Keep the AI on your hardware, no cloud dependency. Curated models, guardrailed to stay helpful, running on your silicon.

Antennas

Upgrade range when you need it. Sleek embedded designs for Seed; multi-antenna arrays for Indri. Future: window-sticker antennas and other radical form factors.

Solaris Housings

Waterproof + weatherproof enclosures with solar power routing. Drop a phone, a camera, or a compute module inside and plug it in. "Just put it outside and it works."

Why this exists.

Bitstead is what happens when someone keeps getting screwed by subscriptions, surveillance, and hardware that stops working the moment the company decides to stop supporting it — and finally has the skills to build the alternative.

I spent seventeen years in IT — long enough to see every "smart" device become a brick when its maker went under, every "lifetime" license turn into an annual fee, every "your data is safe with us" become a breach disclosure.

Then a brain injury took me out of the workforce for two years. I came back to find the subscription economy had eaten the rest of my independence. Rent on the cloud. Rent on the storage. Rent on the software I used to own outright. Every month, another invoice for the privilege of accessing my own work.

So I started building the alternative. Not for a customer base — for the people around me who kept saying "I wish I had that." Not as a product roadmap — as a refusal.

Bitstead is the seed (pun intended) of an answer to a question nobody in tech wants to ask: what if the people building the infrastructure kept it?

Your data stays home. Your decisions stay yours. Your hardware stays working.

Talk to me.

Suppliers, clients, investors, the curious, the skeptical — especially the skeptical. I read every message. I answer most of them.

Prefer email? [email protected]. No tracker pixels, no marketing automation, no newsletter signup, no follow-up sequence designed to wear you down. Just me reading what you wrote.