Guide & Resources for SurfSense

SurfSense lets you drop in documents you can't upload to a third party, ask questions and get answers that cite their sources, all processed on your own infrastructure. It turns the same source documents into different output formats, a structured summary, flashcards, a slide deck, a study guide or a podcast, depending on what you need. The self-hosted stack runs a FastAPI backend with Celery workers for background processing, an embedding model for search, and ElectricSQL for real-time sync between the Postgres database and the frontend. Upstream has recently shifted its primary focus to a desktop app; this Docker Compose stack is still open source and installable, but is now community-supported rather than the officially backed path. Platform-specific connectors (Amazon, Google Maps and similar) live under a separate Business Source License, while the core application remains Apache-2.0.

Start using SurfSense with Elestio. Here are some guides and resources to help you get started.