From app to self-hosted — a Speckle user's story

Hello Speckle Team,

Over the years I’ve tried to introduce Speckle in my company, and it has been really useful for communicating with clients and allowing them to follow the progress of projects as they developed. We even had clients who, throughout the course of projects, started asking us for the 3D model on Speckle specifically — both for how easy it is to visualise and because it allows them to leave comments directly on the 3D models.

We ended up upgrading our account to the $96/year plan with 5 projects, which roughly matched the number of projects I had running under my responsibility at any given time — though I still had to manage things by deleting older projects to make room for new ones.

Throughout this time, whenever I could, I reached out to share feedback — flagging bugs or suggesting improvements. I was genuinely thrilled when I heard you had secured investor funding to keep doing what you do best. At the time I was even planning to send you a message with some ideas I had for Speckle — with that kind of backing, we could dream big.

My idea was to bring sensor data into Speckle, to give life to 3D models even after projects are completed. I’m a Home Assistant user, and I dreamed of seeing live data inside Speckle, with dynamic visual responses driven by real sensor values — something along the lines of what Autodesk Tandem is doing now. But that’s a longer conversation for another thread.

What actually brings me here is that our licence is about to expire, and I can’t justify to my company the need to upgrade to the new plans. To keep 5 active projects, we’d be going from $96 to $1,000/year.
I introduced Speckle here out of personal interest — it has been useful in some projects, but the company could live without it.

That said, I don’t want that to happen. I want to stay connected with Speckle, and I’ve managed to convince the team internally to install the self-hosted version. We’ve already got it up and running (we haven’t configured the Revit Connector yet), though I notice the server version is older compared to the app: Server v2.31.15-alpha.1277 vs App v2026.6.1-alpha.2437.

We don’t really need all the features from the latest app version — the goal is simply to share 3D models and embed Speckle links in PDFs to deliver interactive documentation with 3D models. So the self-hosted version works perfectly for that. I would, however, like to know whether there are any plans to release a more up-to-date server version, or whether development on that front has stalled.

I’ll likely continue using the app with a free account to keep up with new developments, and occasionally for more complex project — once they’re wrapped up, I’ll move the models over to the self-hosted server to free up space on the app.

Thanks

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The open-source core server IS older, you are right, but it is considered stable and maintained. It does receive patches for the underlying components and dependencies, but the core functionality you describe and use is in place.

Most of what is live and different on app.speckle.systems is features we build on top of that open-source core that, from time to time, requires some additional compatible patches.

That sounds amazing. I have also been trying to convince my firm to get a paid version. But our problem is that we didn’t have regular projects to use on speckle, so i could never convince them. but since you have used the self-hosted version, I will also look into it. Do you have a dedicated person who overlooks your local speckle? Or is your architecture/technology team able to do that easily?

Hello @speckle_soc,

The server installation was handled by myself and a colleague, we both have some programming background, though that’s no longer really a requirement for setting up these kinds of applications. With the help of Claude, anyone can get it done without much trouble. And if you run into any questions along the way, this forum is always here.