Quickstart 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.

Deploy SurfSense on Elestio

1. Open the SurfSense deployment page and sign in, or create an account.
2. Choose a cloud provider, a region and a data center. Pick the region closest to your users for the lowest latency.
3. Choose an instance size. Elestio only lists the sizes that can run SurfSense properly (at least 2 vCPU and 4 GB of RAM).
4. Choose your support plan and the maintenance window for system and software updates (times are in UTC).
5. Click Create Service. SurfSense is deployed and ready in a few minutes, and you receive an email with the access details.

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the installation guide.

Access SurfSense

Open your service in the Elestio dashboard and go to the Overview tab. Click Display Admin UI to reveal the URL, username and password of your SurfSense instance.

If the password field is blank, SurfSense does not ship with a pre-created admin user: open the admin URL to start its setup. Software without a web interface, such as databases, is reached with the credentials and port listed in the same tab. See Admin UI and credentials.

Next steps

• Custom domain and SSL: point your own domain to SurfSense (guide).
• Backups: new services follow a 3-2-1 backup strategy by default (backups).
• Updates: manage the SurfSense version and update policy (software versions and updates).
• Learn SurfSense: read the official SurfSense documentation.