Free Fit Call
Free
A 30-minute conversation to find out whether sovereign infrastructure is right for your household. No pitch, no pressure.
Investment
Every Dollar, Itemized.
You'll never see a bundled mystery number from us. Your price has three parts — the work, the hardware, and ongoing stewardship — and each one is broken down below. Hardware is passed through at actual cost plus a flat 5% sourcing fee. You see the receipts.
Founding Member Rate
First 3–5 clients. You get founding pricing and outsized influence on the roadmap; we get the real-world use that makes the product better. That's the trade.
Discovery
Start with fit and assessment.
Remote Private System Assessment
Free
A deep dive into your current services, subscriptions, data, and household needs. You receive a precise migration plan and hardware recommendation — yours to keep whether or not you proceed.
If you already own hardware you'd like to integrate — a home server, unused workstations, storage drives, networking gear — the assessment includes evaluating whether reusing your own hardware can reduce your build cost. We are not here to sell you gear you already have.
On-Site Assessment
$750
Optional — only required for specific hardware configurations: complex networking, camera systems, or multi-building properties. Most deployments don't need it.
The Setup Week
A transition you don't feel.
Architecture, sourcing, the system build, and The Setup Week: we mirror your data from your existing services in the background, validate every byte, then bring each service online one at a time. Your existing services remain active until the migrated system has been validated and each service is ready to switch over. You're not paying for hours of IT labor — you're paying for a transition you don't feel.
Founding Member Setup
$5,000 $8,000
Standard rate $8,000 — Founding Member pricing limited to our first clients.
Hardware and ongoing stewardship are priced separately below — no padding, no bundling.
1. Mirror
Your photos, files, music, and documents are copied from your current services to your new server while everything you use today keeps running. Nothing is touched, nothing is at risk.
2. Validate
Every file is verified against the original. We don't move on until the copy is provably complete.
3. Switch Over
Your existing services remain active until the migrated system has been validated and each service is ready to switch over.
Why $5,000?
The honest math behind the number.
What the setup fee actually buys
The setup fee isn't IT labor priced by the hour. Building this yourself runs 80–120 hours if you're already technical — several hundred starting from zero. But hours aren't the real cost. DIY self-hosting doesn't fail through catastrophe; it fails through chronic unreliability — the sync that silently stops, the weekly restart, the system you stop trusting until you drift back to the cloud subscriptions you were escaping, because they're reliable and your project isn't. You're buying a system built and commissioned to be boring: it just works, so you actually live on it. Comparable integration work runs $6,000–$10,000 in labor alone — and the price includes six months of Guardian Care during commissioning, active refinement worth $600 at the founding rate or $1,800 at standard.
The subscription math
Most households already spend $60–$120/month renting fragments of what Trustline builds — cloud photo storage, document sync, AI subscriptions, password managers, media hosting. That's $700–$1,400 a year, forever, with prices rising and ownership at zero. A Trustline estate pays for itself against those subscriptions in roughly 5–8 years, and every year after that is pure upside — plus you own something the cloud services will never sell you: sovereignty over your own data.
Who this is actually for
If you're technical and love tinkering, you've probably already built something like this — and honestly, you don't need us. Trustline exists for everyone else: people who've wanted this level of privacy for years but were never going to spend months of evenings becoming their own system administrator to get it. The price only looks high if you value your time at zero. What you're buying is the result — privacy, ownership, and a system that runs itself — without the second job.
You can't normally buy this.
Complete digital self-sufficiency is almost impossible to purchase — because nobody with scale wants to sell it. Subscription companies are built on recurring dependence; a one-time sale that ends the relationship is against the business model. Hiring someone to manage a server doesn't escape it either — you've just changed landlords. Trustline is built backwards from all of that: our business model is making sure you never need us again. Your estate runs without us, survives without us, and is documented so anyone could take over. Guardian Care exists for households that want our continued work — improvement, not dependence — and it cancels any time without your system noticing.
Core Infrastructure
Two foundations. One complete estate.
Every Trustline estate includes protected storage, secure access, power protection, private services, and capable local AI. Essential is right-sized for normal household use. Expansion-Ready adds newer platform hardware, larger storage, dedicated networking, and greater expansion headroom.
AI Capacity Upgrades
Your private AI, scaled to the work.
Every foundation includes capable local AI. Add more capacity when you need larger models, longer working context, heavier workflows, or more simultaneous users.
Advanced
~$4,000
A dedicated 128GB unified-memory AI node for larger models, longer working context, and substantially heavier Personal AI Agent workloads. The foundation’s 16GB accelerator remains available for utility inference, fallback, and camera detection.
Available with either foundation.
Any faster inter-node networking required by the assessed workload is included in the AI upgrade quote.
Household
~$5,500
Everything in Advanced, plus a separate 24GB-class accelerator. Multiple inference backends keep the Operator available while two or three people use private AI for chat, drafting, research, documents, and daily work.
Requires Expansion-Ready Foundation.
Estate
~$7,500
Everything in Household, with a matched dual-accelerator pair providing 48GB of aggregate GPU memory for supported multi-GPU runtimes, or independent backends for concurrency, specialization, and fallback.
Requires Expansion-Ready Foundation.
Our floor, in writing: every foundation includes sufficient local compute for the AI capabilities promised by that configuration. Capacity upgrades add model size, working context, throughput, and concurrency. Safety controls, approval requirements, validation, audit logging, and recovery protections remain consistent across every configuration.
Upgrading later: Advanced can be added to either foundation without replacing the core estate or migrating its data. Household and Estate require the power, cooling, networking, and expansion headroom of the Expansion-Ready Foundation.
Hardware sourcing: baseline accelerators may use carefully validated datacenter-class hardware when it offers the best value. Higher-capacity hardware is selected for model compatibility, performance, power, acoustics, software support, and serviceability.
All hardware is passed through at actual cost plus a 5% sourcing and validation fee. You see the receipts.
What It Adds Up To
No hidden math.
Complete Founding Member deployments and common AI-upgrade examples.
Complete baseline estates
Essential Estate
~$6,000–$6,500
- Setup + 6 months Guardian Care$5,000
- Essential Foundation with baseline AI~$1,000–$1,500
Complete private services and capable everyday local AI.
Expansion-Ready Estate
~$8,500
- Setup + 6 months Guardian Care$5,000
- Expansion-Ready Foundation with baseline AI~$3,500
More storage, dedicated networking, and full internal expansion headroom.
AI-upgraded estates
Advanced AI Estate
~$10,000
- Setup + 6 months Guardian Care$5,000
- Essential Foundation~$1,000–$1,500
- Advanced AI~$4,000
With the Expansion-Ready Foundation instead: approximately $12,500.
Household AI Estate
~$14,000
- Setup + 6 months Guardian Care$5,000
- Expansion-Ready Foundation~$3,500
- Household AI~$5,500
Estate AI
~$16,000
- Setup + 6 months Guardian Care$5,000
- Expansion-Ready Foundation~$3,500
- Estate AI~$7,500
Everything is yours. No hardware lease, no mandatory cloud-AI subscription, and no company between you and your data.
Founding Member Setup includes 6 months of mandatory Guardian Care at no additional cost. Continuation after commissioning is optional at $100/month.
Guardian Care
Your Commissioning Period.
Every Trustline estate is unique to the household it serves. Guardian Care isn't about keeping your system functional — your estate does that on its own. It's about making it better, continuously: new integrations with the services your household actually runs, new capabilities for the AI Operator and your Personal AI Agent, portal improvements, and better AI performance. Maintenance is table stakes. What you're subscribed to is momentum.
Standard Rate Setup — 3 months of Guardian Care included and required
Every deployment includes a commissioning window immediately after The Setup Week — active tuning, validation, and integration with your household before handing off full stewardship.
Founding Member Setup — extended to 6 monthsFounding Members get double the commissioning window because they're shaping the product itself: every improvement we build during those months ships to their estates first.
You don't know what you don't knowNo Setup Week catches everything. A month in, you'll reach for something your old cloud setup did and find your estate doesn't do it yet. That's not a failure; it's expected, and it's exactly what the commissioning period is for. Tell us, and we build the equivalent — and here's the part that makes this cooperative: once we've built it for you, it becomes standard for every Trustline estate going forward. Your gap becomes everyone's feature.
After your commissioning period$100/mo
Standard rate $300/mo — Founding Members lock in $100/month for as long as they remain subscribed, no time limit.
And when we say cancel any time, here's precisely what that means: your estate keeps running — services, storage, AI, all of it. The AI Operator keeps handling day-to-day maintenance through its tested skills. What stops is new capability work: deep integrations and novel features are deliberately outside the Operator's scope — it runs bounded, verified skills by design, not open-ended system access — so new capabilities come from us. Walk away and you lose the stream of improvements, never the system itself.
Straight Answers
The questions you should be asking.
An investment this size deserves blunt answers, not marketing. Here is exactly where you stand.
What happens if Trustline disappears tomorrow?
Nothing happens to your estate. That is the entire point. Your system is built on durable, open-source, industry-standard software — Nextcloud, Home Assistant, OpenVPN — running on hardware you own outright. There are no proprietary formats, no license servers, and no dependency on us to keep running. At handoff you receive full documentation, and any competent administrator could take over stewardship. The exit door is part of the architecture.
What happens when my internet goes out?
Your estate keeps working. Files, photos, cameras, automations, and your AI Operator all run locally inside your home — they don't need the internet to exist. The only thing you lose during an outage is remote access from outside the house, and that resumes the moment your connection does. Compare that to the cloud, where an outage means your entire digital life goes dark.
What if a hard drive fails?
Drive failure is planned for, not feared. Storage is mirrored and designed to keep data available if a single drive fails — the system keeps running while the drive is replaced. Behind that sits a 3-2-1 backup posture: local snapshots, off-site encrypted copies, and restore paths that are actually tested during deployment, not assumed. Every build is also stress-checked during burn-in before it ever reaches your home.
Am I locked into Trustline?
No, and we'd be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. Your setup price includes a fixed commissioning period of Guardian Care — it's bundled in, not a recurring charge you're signing up for. After commissioning, Guardian Care is a month-to-month subscription, not a contract — cancel anytime, no penalty. Your data lives in standard formats on your own disks. If you ever want to walk away, you take everything with you, because you already have everything. Sovereignty that requires our permission wouldn't be sovereignty.
Why is Guardian Care required at first?
Because your estate is being tuned to your household. Every deployment is unique — your data patterns, your devices, your workflows, your family's use of the AI Operator. Guardian Care during the commissioning window is how we validate the system against real use, ship refinements as they're needed, and honor the Setup Week guarantee beyond Day 7. It is standard practice for any custom-built infrastructure. After commissioning, it becomes fully optional.
What if I don't want ongoing Guardian Care after commissioning?
Cancel any time. Your estate keeps running — services, storage, AI, all of it, with the Operator still handling day-to-day maintenance through its tested skills. What stops is new capability and integration work; the system itself never depends on the subscription. You are the landlord; we work for you only as long as you want us to.
Do I need to be technical to own this?
No. That is what the AI Operator exists for. It monitors system health, handles updates and troubleshooting, and answers your questions in plain English — "Is everything okay?" gets a real answer. You also receive walkthroughs and a practical operating model at handoff. Routine operation is handled; sensitive or consequential actions remain under your approval.
Does the AI Operator send my data to the cloud?
Never — with one exception: it can look things up on the web when you ask, like any private browser search. What never leaves your network: your files, your conversations, your documents, and your data. No company logs your AI activity, trains on it, or retains it. It knows your files and your home state, but it knows them only for you. Its actions are also bounded: it does not make irreversible changes without your approval.
Why not just buy a NAS for $600?
You can, and for some people that's the right call. But a NAS is a box, not an estate. What you're paying for here is the architecture, the migration of years of data without loss, the validation of every backup and sync path, the AI Operator layer, and an accountable human responsible for the whole system working together. The hardware is the cheapest part of sovereignty. The box without the stewardship is how people end up with a $600 shelf ornament and their photos still in iCloud.
What if I already have hardware I want to reuse?
Bring it. The Private System Assessment includes evaluating whether existing hardware you own — servers, storage, networking gear, workstations — can be integrated into your estate to reduce cost. Not every piece will make sense to keep, but where it does, we build around it. You are the landlord; we are not here to force you to buy things you don't need.
Do I need the largest AI configuration?
No. Every Trustline foundation includes capable local AI for everyday assistance, documents, communications, research, and standard Operator workflows. Advanced, Household, and Estate configurations add larger models, longer working context, heavier workloads, and more simultaneous users. We recommend the smallest configuration that reliably supports the household’s actual needs.
Why is the hardware so expensive?
Because the market is expensive right now. AI demand has driven DRAM prices roughly double their pre-2025 levels, and high-end GPUs remain well above their historical baseline. This affects everyone building capable local AI infrastructure — us, the biggest cloud companies, hobbyists. We source at the best prices we can find, pass hardware through at actual cost plus a flat 5% sourcing fee, and show you the receipts. As supply catches up with demand, we expect prices to normalize, and future Trustline builds will cost less. Today's Founding Members are paying today's market rate for hardware, with no markup layered on top of it.
How long does the migration take?
Typically 5-7 days. We build your estate in the background, mirror your data exactly, and validate every byte against the original. Your existing services remain active until the migrated system has been validated and each service is ready to switch over.
Where do you deploy?
Trustline is based in Northeast Ohio. We deploy across the greater Ohio region — roughly a Cleveland–Columbus–Pittsburgh–Detroit radius. Farther deployments are considered case by case; mention your location on the fit call and we'll give you a straight answer. Setup Week is scheduled on your calendar, not ours — the architect is on-site and fully dedicated for the duration.
Scope your deployment