a community for home labbers and retro geeks
What Nekotopia is, who's behind it, and how it actually works today.
Nekotopia is a community for home labbers and retro geeks — a place to bring your hardware online, tinker with it, and share it with people who get just as excited about a humming rack or a 20-year-old workstation as you do. Wiki, forum, gallery, sgai, and a retro LAN, all wrapped around a private network that connects your kit to everyone else's.
The core idea is a ladder of exposure. Not every machine should sit in the same place on the internet. A precious vintage box you're keeping alive needs near-total isolation; a project you're actively building and want the world to reach needs the opposite. So instead of one all-or-nothing setting, you pick the rung that fits each machine:
A WireGuard tunnel to your nearest hub. Your machine talks to other nodes on the network and nothing else — no internet breakout, no public address. The safe default for fragile or experimental kit.
Extend an L2 segment across the mesh so distant machines share a LAN as if they were plugged into the same switch. Retro protocols and LAN-only software just work.
A dedicated public IPv4 mapped straight to one machine via bidirectional NAT. Reachable from the internet, no router of your own required — a controlled door to the outside.
A routable prefix advertised over BGP from your own router. No NAT, no middlebox, pure L3 — you run your own slice of the public internet.
Nobody sane puts a two-decade-old box raw on the internet. The point of the ladder is that you never have to. Each machine gets exactly the security and exposure it needs, and you can move it up or down a rung whenever the job changes.
One person. Nekotopia is built and operated by a single maintainer (Richard, "druk"), self-funded, on time carved out around everything else. It exists because it's the thing they wished existed and couldn't find — somewhere to safely put old and odd hardware on a real network among people who'd appreciate it.
There's no sales team, no upsell, no growth target. There never was one. It's a passion project that happens to run on production-grade plumbing.
Right now, it's free. Sign up, connect your kit, and use it. There is nothing to buy.
That said, this is honest about what keeps it alive. Nekotopia isn't a single VPS with WireGuard on it — it's real, multi-region infrastructure: WireGuard hubs across several global regions, a RIPE NCC membership, BYOIP address space advertised over BGP, a web server, and a docker host running the wiki, forum and monitoring. That costs real money every month, and the maintainer covers it personally.
The breakdown below is shared purely as transparency — here's what it takes to keep this running. It is not a pitch and there is nothing to pledge.
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Note: The maintainer doesn't take a salary, and the time that goes into development, operations, community, and on-call support is on top of the figures above.
Long term, the higher rungs of the ladder are meant to be paid products — dedicated addresses, routed prefixes, and the heavier networking features cost money to provide, so eventually they'll carry a price. You can read how that's intended to be structured on the plans page.
Nothing is for sale yet. During early access, the features that are planned to be paid are switched on for free for early members. When pricing does arrive, it'll be announced clearly and ahead of time — no surprises.
See the plans → — the intended future shape, for context only.
A few principles that have held since day one:
What it costs to run is shared openly — the figures above are live from AWS, not estimates. No hidden costs, no surprises.
This isn't being built to flip or to sell. It's here because the community is the point.
Features, regions and users get added at a pace one person can actually support. No VC, no growth-at-all-costs.
WireGuard, BGP, RIPE-registered address space, standard routing. No proprietary protocols, no vendor lock-in.
Yes. Right now everything is on at no cost. There's nothing to buy and nothing to pledge.
WireGuard hub routers across several regions, a FreeBSD web server, a docker host running wiki/forum/monitoring, NAT, load balancers, Transit Gateway peering, and RIPE NCC annual membership. It's real multi-region infrastructure, not a single VPS with WireGuard on it.
1:1 dedicated NAT gives one machine a dedicated public IP via bidirectional NAT — simple, no router of your own needed. Fully routed gives you a routable prefix you advertise via BGP from your own router — no NAT, pure L3, you control the routing. One is for getting a single box online; the other is for running your own network.
The maintainer is the sole decision-maker. Community input is valued and shapes the roadmap, but the buck stops in one place.
No. This is a passion project. If circumstances ever changed, the community would be told and given options including data export and transition time.
If you want to talk about the project or how something works: