Hardware you already own.

From scrap heaps, not slideware.

Homeplate’s founder — @MerkleGhost — comes from hardware. The kind of background where you pull machines out of the recycling stream, open them up, and put them back to work. Where a “retired” laptop isn’t e-waste; it’s a perfectly good computer someone stopped wanting.

Spend enough years watching working silicon get shredded and you develop two instincts. First: hardware deserves a second life. The most sustainable machine is the one that already exists. Second: don’t build on dependencies you don’t control. If a critical part of your work happens on someone else’s computer, at someone else’s price, at someone else’s uptime — you don’t own your process, you rent it.

CI was the same story.

Look at how most teams run GitHub Actions: every build rents time on a datacenter machine at up to $0.062 a minute — while the developer’s own Mac, often faster than the runner they’re renting, idles on the desk. Then GitHub has an outage and everyone just… stops. Not because their machines broke. Because the dependency did.

Homeplate is the hardware-world answer: reuse what you already have. Your machine runs your CI. Your code compiles on your silicon. And when GitHub goes down, Homeplate keeps working offline and syncs when it comes back — because a tool that dies with its vendor’s status page is exactly the kind of dependency this project exists to remove.

The name is the mission: bring your runners home.

What that means for the tool.

Your hardware first

Compute you already paid for gets used before a single rented minute. Caps keep it a good neighbor on your machine.

No fake claims

Self-hosted isn’t $0 — the $0.002/min private-repo fee is in the UI, the counter, and the docs. A tool about honesty can’t lie on its own homepage.

Degrade, don’t die

Offline mode runs your workflows with no network at all and replays results later. GitHub being down is an inconvenience, not a stop work order.

No lock-in

One binary, one config file, standard GitHub features. Uninstall and GitHub never knew you left.