Guide & Resources
SurfSense features
What you can do with SurfSense, fully managed by Elestio.
What you can do with SurfSense, fully managed by Elestio.
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.
Drop in documents you can't upload elsewhere, everything runs on your own machine, with no account to create and nothing uploaded.
Turn the same source documents into a summary, flashcards, a slide deck, a study guide or a podcast.
Ask questions across your documents and get answers with citations back to the source material, not just a generic summary.
Bring your own model key, or let the app use a local model, the core application is Apache-2.0.
Explore SurfSense on Elestio
SurfSense runs on a dedicated instance, with backups, monitoring, SSL and updates handled by Elestio. Learn more about the software and everything included with the managed service.
Overview, screenshots and key benefits of SurfSense.
Everything Elestio manages for your SurfSense instance.
Deploy SurfSense on Elestio step by step.
Live prices for every cloud provider and region.
Join thousands of developers who trust Elestio for fully managed hosting. Up and running in minutes, on any cloud.