What Haven can do.
Haven is built around modules. Each one handles a different part of your home. Pick what you need, skip what you don't. Everything runs locally on your server.
Cameras and security that stay in your house.
Haven Watch replaces Ring, Nest, and Arlo with cameras that record to your own hard drive. No cloud subscription needed for recording. No footage leaving your network. Person detection, vehicle detection, and object recognition run locally using Frigate and a Coral TPU or your server's CPU. When something happens, you get a notification with a description of what was detected, not just a blurry motion alert.
Set up automation chains: if a person is detected at your door at 2 AM with the alarm armed, Haven can flash every light, trigger a siren, start recording all cameras, and send you a live feed. You decide what happens next, not a monitoring company.
Local access to your camera feeds is always free. Remote access for subscribers.
Your family's location stays in your family.
Haven Locate tracks phones, pets, and vehicles without Life360, Google Location History, or Find My. Phone tracking uses the Home Assistant companion app running in the background. Pet and vehicle tracking uses Meshtastic GPS nodes — small, low-power devices that communicate over long-range radio mesh and don't need cellular or Wi-Fi to report position.
Your location history stays on your server. No one else can see it. No one is selling it. You get maps, history, geofencing (arrive home and the lights turn on), and presence detection (who's home right now). It works the way these features should have always worked — useful without being surveillance.
Your photos and files, on your server, not someone else's.
Haven Vault replaces Google Photos, iCloud, and Dropbox with Immich for photo management and Nextcloud for file storage. Your photos get auto-uploaded from your phone, organized with local AI face and object detection, and stored on drives you own. Search your photos by person, place, or thing without Google ever seeing them.
File sync works like Dropbox: folders on your devices stay in sync through your Haven server. Documents, backups, family files — all accessible from any device on your network, and remotely for subscribers. No storage limits beyond what your hardware can hold. No monthly fee for more space.
Phones that respect your family.
Haven Family will offer pre-configured phones for kids, grandparents, and privacy-focused users. Locked down or opened up to your specifications, with parental controls that don't rely on Apple or Google accounts, app stores that don't track, and communication that routes through your Haven server. Still in development.
On-device intelligence that doesn't phone home.
We're exploring local AI capabilities that go beyond camera detection: voice assistants that process on your hardware, smart home automations that learn your patterns without uploading them, and natural language control of your entire Haven system. When it's ready, it'll run on your server. Not someone else's.
How modules work together.
Because everything runs on the same server, modules talk to each other. Watch can trigger a Locate check when it detects an unknown person. Vault can automatically save camera snapshots when an event fires. Locate's geofencing can arm Watch when the last person leaves and disarm it when someone comes home. It's one system, not twelve separate apps that barely cooperate.
Before you decide, read the catches.
We wrote an entire page about every limitation Haven has and how we address each one. Read it here.
Questions about a specific module?
Tell us what you're trying to solve. We'll tell you which modules apply and what hardware you'd need.
hello@local-haven.com