Skip to content
Exhale

0020. One binary for homes and teams

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-11-10

Context — what it has to do

Section titled “Context — what it has to do”

Exhale started as a tool for a household. A small business has the same problem with more people: tools billed monthly or yearly, renewals nobody remembers, cards that expire, and nobody sure who pays for what. The question was whether a business needs a separate “server edition”.

What a team physically needs that a home does not:

  1. Several people with their own accounts, and a way to bring them in and take them out.
  2. Sign-in with the company’s identity provider, so leaving the company means losing access.
  3. The chat the team already uses (Slack), with renewals visible to the team, not to one person.
  4. To be installed like any other service: a package, a service definition, logs, a health check.
  5. Backups somebody can restore.
  6. HTTPS when it is reached from outside the office.

None of these changes what a subscription, a charge or a reminder is.

Criteria

Section titled “Criteria”
  • Self-hosted, nothing central, no paid tier (vision, principle 1).
  • One thing to build, test, document and upgrade.
  • A home must not pay for what a team needs: no extra services, no extra configuration.

Options

Section titled “Options”
Option Verdict
A) A separate server edition (other binary or build flags) Rejected. Two products to test and document, and the features in question (accounts, SSO, Slack, backups) are useful at home too.
B) Multi-tenant: several households in one instance Rejected. It needs isolation between tenants everywhere, an admin level above households and its own failure modes, for a benefit a second instance gives for free. Already a non-goal in the vision.
C) The same binary; a team is a household Chosen.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”

There is one Exhale. A team is a household: one instance, members with accounts, one data folder. What a business needs ships in the same binary and is off until configured:

  • Accounts, invites and member management (ADR 0006): owners invite, remove and promote; removing a member passes on what they paid for.
  • Single sign-on with any OpenID Connect provider, configured by environment; password login can be turned off.
  • Slack as an interactive channel over Socket Mode, so no public address is needed (ADR 0007, 0019), next to Telegram, email, ntfy and webhooks.
  • Packaging: .deb and .rpm that install a hardened systemd service with a dedicated user, a container image, an install script and a launchd agent for macOS.
  • Automatic daily backups inside the binary, with exhale backup and exhale restore.
  • Guides for HTTPS behind a reverse proxy and for running Exhale for a team.

The words in the product stay neutral (“Sharing”, “people you share with”) so they fit a family and a team.

A company with several teams that must not see each other runs one instance per team.

Consequences — cost we accept

Section titled “Consequences — cost we accept”
  • No central administration across instances, no per-department permissions inside one instance beyond owner/member and private subscriptions.
  • Features aimed at companies with procurement (approval flows, seat usage, vendor benchmarks) are out of scope. The feature scan lists them as not worth it for this product.
  • Team features must stay invisible to a single user: every one of them is optional and has no cost when unused.

Revisit when

Section titled “Revisit when”
  • Teams ask for roles between owner and member (for example “can see everything, cannot change”).
  • Running one instance per team becomes the common complaint.