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Lumberjack is one year old today. This is my gift for you.

I'm making AlfredOS open source. If you don't know what AlfredOS is, it's an AI-first business OS for solopreneurs. For Quick Start, watch the video below.

Deploy AlfredOS on Railway

The Story of Alfred

The idea of Alfred was one of the first things I started working on when I launched the Lumberjack. My development of Alfred has basically became synonymous with the blog.

Building my own butler
I canā€™t hire Alfred so Iā€™ll build my own
LumberjackDavid Szabo-Stuban

A few month later I was making progress but things started to become more complicated. Turns out when an AI system can manage its own context, it may break things or mess things up. But the moment you want to manage its context yourself, you're in for a ride. The first version was a simple Telegram bot.

Alfred, my AI butler - Progress Update
What makes one butler smarter than another.
LumberjackDavid Szabo-Stuban

Then I realized that one way of managing the context would be making sure it has access to all the data it needs but nothing more. So concurrently I started working on AlfredOS ā†’ a place where my Alfred could live and it could have hardwired integration to all the stuff it actually needs to operate.

Iā€™m building AlfredOS
SaaS providers are killing your solopreneur business and what to do about it.
LumberjackDavid Szabo-Stuban

This was fun until it wasn't. I built AlfredOS v1.0 which was supposed to run on Linux only and it was deploying Docker images into Docker images. I was in way over my head and the whole thing was unusable.

AlfredOS 1.0 is here!
Complete business stack in a box ā€” self-hosted, privacy-focused (alpha release)
LumberjackDavid Szabo-Stuban

So I went back to the whiteboard and realized that instead of trying to figure out DevOps (I'm shit at that) I should work on figuring out the AI bit (I'm somewhat better at that). So I started working on AlfredOS v1.1, completely rebuilt from the grounds up, as a Railway.com template and that takes us to today.

The AI-first OS for solopreneurs

I finally built an AI-first operating system to run my small business. My goal is to run my business autonomously and AlfredOS provides the scaffolding.

The Tech Stack

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Why not just use ChatGPT / Claude / ?

ChatGPT Deep Research is great. Claude is great for copywriting. Manus is really good at agentic stuff. Bills rack up quickly. It's SaaS all over again.

I'd rather pay for token cost which dropped 280x over the last 3 years!

The only exception as of now is Claude Max and only because it comes with near-unlimited Claude Code access. But I'll write about that in another post.

Also once LibreChat finally ships their API you'll be able to just use a singular MCP connection to plug AlfredOS into Claude or any other agent. Point is, the value of AlfredOS is not the agent. It's the plumbing.

In order to truly go AI-first here's what I figured I'd need:

  1. A simple chat agent that I can use (for this I chose LibreChat because it pretty much feels like ChatGPT but there are loads of extra features and I can plug in any model I want to)
  2. A way to self-host business critical apps like Ghost for my blog or n8n for automations (for this I chose Railway.com for now, will probably move over to Hetzner at some point)
  3. Native integration between agent and apps because I don't want to deal with this kind of stuff. I just want my AI to know how to create n8n workflows or write blog articles.
  4. Manage memory, custom prompts and agents with a few clicks which will allow me to write down an SOP once and the AI should actually do it for me. Instead of me having to prompt all the time.
  5. Combine n8n with the agent to create true automations which would need a LibreChat API and I heard it's on the roadmap for this year.

Basically what I needed is a simple way to centralize all my data in one place and plug an agent into it. AlfredOS makes all that possible now savings $$$ and also with near-zero maintenance.

How to Install

When you click on Deploy, here's what happens:

  1. The template creates a new Railway project.
  2. n8n, Ghost, Cal.com and NocoDB gets deployed.
  3. A custom LibreChat fork called Alfred also gets deployed.
  4. During deployment, Alfred creates hardwired MCP connections to the apps installed in step 1. You will need to provide three licence keys during install. Just follow the video. For the LICENCE_KEY just add lumberjack.
  5. Voila! You have your own custom AI-first business OS with an agent that can actually do stuff for you.

I built AlfredOS because:

  1. I hate paying SaaS fees
  2. I hate managing self-hosted servers
  3. I hate copy/pasting stuff into ChatGPT/Claude/etc.
  4. I hate having to comb through weird docs to make AI stuff work

Instead, I wanted:

  1. A bunch of apps that I can deploy with a single click (like n8n or Ghost)
  2. Something that feels like ChatGPT but can use all of my tools without me having to lift a finder.
  3. A way for me to truly own my data and not be restricted by third parties.

So I built AlfredOS. All you need to have is a Railway.com account and you can deploy it for free.

Deploy AlfredOS on Railway
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This is v1.1 so drop me comments if you find bugs or have any issues. If you paid for AlfredOS before, you have received an email from me recently explaining the reasoning behind making AlfredOS open source and also future plans.