One person, in the open.
MeshHold is built by Iurii Iakovlev in Novi Sad, Serbia. Not a team, not a startup, not a company — a private project, in public, under AGPL-3.0.
- Maintainers
- One
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
- Company
- None yet
- Funding
- None
- Your data
- On your hardware
Why it exists
It started as the thing I wanted and could not buy: storage, chat, calls, a mesh VPN and a media library that all run on machines I own, work when the internet does not, and do not require me to trust a company I cannot inspect. Everything since has come from running it — the features exist because something did not work in an actual house, on an actual laptop, over an actual bad connection.
That is also why it is not a polished product with a growth plan. It is a working system that got documented, and then got a website.
The question you are actually asking
Anybody evaluating this for an organisation gets to the same place: what happens if the one person building it stops? It is the right question and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance.
If I disappeared tomorrow
- Your deployment keeps running. Nothing phones home for permission, no licence check expires, and nothing about a node depends on us being reachable. It runs until you stop it.
- Your data stays readable. It is on your hardware, in a documented format, reachable by software whose source you have. There is no export to request and nobody to request it from.
- The code stays yours to continue. AGPL-3.0, public, with the protocol written down in the architecture spec. You can maintain it, pay somebody to, or fork it — none of which needs my agreement.
- What you would lose is me. New features, fixes and the direct line to the person who wrote it. That is a real loss, and it is the honest size of the risk: you would be inheriting a working system without its author, not losing access to your own files.
None of that is a consolation prize for the licence. It is the reason for it: a design where the vendor going away is survivable is a different kind of thing from one where it is not, and that difference was deliberate from the start.
Who it is for
People who run their own machines, and organisations that have to keep data somewhere specific — a jurisdiction, a building, a ship. Homelabs first, because that is where it gets tested hardest; then teams in Europe replacing a US cloud they cannot legally use, and operations that run where connectivity is bad or absent.
Not for everyone, deliberately. If what you want is somebody else to run it for you, this is the wrong tool and there are good ones that do that.
Where it is going
A Business tier in 2026 — multi-user inside one node, directory integration, per-vault roles, a fleet view, and a contract to go with it. The open-source build stays open-source; the Business tier is what makes the maintainer count something other than one.
If you want to be part of that earlier rather than later, there is the waitlist and the partner programme, and both pages say plainly what does not exist yet.