Compute
Raspberry Pi 5 (aarch64), 4 cores at a load of about 0.1 — mostly idle headroom.
Homelab · Demo
A Raspberry Pi that pays for itself
A working specimen of turning a self-hosted Pi homelab into revenue — the hardware, the measured numbers, and the services it can sell. Everything described here runs on the box serving this page.
Hardware
The box
Measured live, not from a datasheet.
Storage
858 GB free on NVMe — room for a Storj node, backups, or a local NVR.
Network
33.6 Mbps up / 354.7 Mbps down, on a residential IPv4 not behind CGNAT.
Already running
Home Assistant, a Matter server, cloudflared tunnel, an OpenCode AI server, and a web terminal — in production now.
The playbook
Three ways to make it pay
Ranked by speed to first dollar, not by ceiling.
Smart-home services
Fastest to real money. Consult, install, and remotely manage Home Assistant + Matter for neighbours and Airbnb hosts — the stack is already live here.
Micro-SaaS
Sell the spare compute and the residential IP: screenshot/PDF rendering, uptime monitoring, status pages.
Passive resource income
Rent idle bandwidth and storage. Honest math: roughly $4–10/month net — beer money, not a business.
Offerings
What I can build for you
Illustrative pricing — this page is itself a demo.
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01
Smart-home setup & automation
Home Assistant, Matter/Thread devices, automations, custom dashboards.
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02
Managed “smart-home IT” retainer
Remote monitoring, updates, and fixes over a Cloudflare tunnel.
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03
Vacation-rental automation
Keyless locks, leak & noise sensors, auto-expiring guest codes.
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04
Self-hosting “done for you” + Zero Trust
Migrate off Google/Dropbox; secure remote access with Cloudflare Access.
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05
Screenshot & PDF rendering API
Rendered by headless Chromium on this Pi — see the proof below.
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06
Custom Home Assistant dashboards
Polished Lovelace / Grafana control surfaces.
Proof of concept
Rendered by this Pi
Headless Chromium (Playwright) on the Raspberry Pi captured this page from the live web — the same mechanism behind a paid screenshot/PDF API.
Under the hood
How this page is served
The demo is a static file, but the box behind it is not.
This page is a static file in the aiwebsite repo, deployed to Cloudflare by git push from this Pi.
The screenshot above was generated on demand by the Pi’s headless Chromium. Home Assistant, the Matter server, the OpenCode AI server, and the web terminal all run 24/7 on the same box, fronted by a cloudflared tunnel behind Cloudflare Access.
A residential IPv4 renders pages with fewer bot-blocks than a datacenter — which is the whole point: the Pi is the demo, the lab, and the product.