Built on a real homelab. By the person running it.

ChannelDesk is built and maintained by Brian Wijnandts — a developer who got tired of wiring Telegram bots and cron scripts together and wanted Claude to live inside his homelab instead of in a SaaS tab. Every feature on this site is running on his actual cluster before it ships here.

The reference homelab

ChannelDesk is developed against the same infrastructure most homelabbers can replicate. Nothing exotic, nothing rented:

• k3s on Proxmox — one master + three workers, plus a dev-only worker for risky changes.
• Raspberry Pi 5 — runs a private npm registry and an always-on CI-runner fallback.
• Synology DS115j — the NAS that backs up everything that matters.
• UniFi gateway, Philips Hue bridge, P1 smart-meter reader — three integrations Brian actually uses every day, exposed to ChannelDesk through the same capability graph any custom integration plugs into.
• Self-hosted SonarQube + in-cluster CI — every push runs the same build pipeline you can fork off this repo.

That's why ChannelDesk's defaults look the way they do. The /cluster page exists because Brian wanted one screen that showed every node. The Posture audit fires the checks he already runs by hand. The chat dock pops approval prompts because the alternative — agents writing to disk without asking — wasn't going to fly on his home cluster.

Principles

Your keys, your data. ChannelDesk has no cloud component. No telemetry phones home. API keys, flow definitions and session transcripts never leave the box you run it on.

Boring stack on purpose. Postgres, Redis, Socket.IO, NestJS, Angular. No custom DSLs, no proprietary runtime. If a piece offends you, replace it without touching the rest.

Claude-native, not Claude-coupled. Sessions are full claude-code subprocesses with MCP tool access. Skills, MCP servers and integrations are per-agent — the user stays in command of what each agent can touch.

Operations should feel instant. Host-aware UI, optimistic updates, offline-capable PWA. No "waiting for the cloud" spinners — the cloud isn't in the loop.

Who it's for

Today, ChannelDesk ships to self-hosters — the people who already run their own k3s, their own infra, and know what a capability is. A commercial tier is on the roadmap once the homelab story holds up under real users; if you want early access or hosting help, get in touch.