Your photos stay inside the walls.
Joist 4 is a home server for the hall closet. It keeps every photo and file your family has, and its AI finds them by what's in them.
Joist 4 on the second shelf of the hall closet, next to the towels.
214 Alder Street, hall closet. This page is the plan of the house. Walk it from the curb to the garage.
One cable, to the router in the den. No Wi-Fi radio, no camera, no microphone.
Four drives, two copies of every photo. Pull one in the closet and nothing is lost.
On the living-room TV, its photo search, worked out on the box. Nothing asked the internet.
Not one photo goes to anyone's cloud, ours included.
$549Joist 4, four drive baysor $399 for Joist 2. $49 reserves one, refundable any day until it ships in March 2027. No subscription, ever.
- Works with
- iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, and TV apps for Apple TV, Google TV and Roku.
- Setup
- One cable to your router, then open joist.local on your phone. About 20 minutes.
Curb 214 Alder Street · lot 60' × 120'
Alder Street, and further pilot houses
312 houses have run a Joist in a closet since May.
The pilot boxes are the same Joist 4 you can reserve. Here are four of their plans: where each family put it, and what they wrote back.
Grandma asked for the lake pictures from 2011. I typed "lake 2011 grandma" on the TV and she was in the first row.
We stopped paying for two cloud plans the week it came. Our phones finally have room again.
Drive 2 died in August. Kareem swapped it during dinner. Nobody lost a thing, and nobody noticed.
I read the crossings log on Sunday mornings. It's the shortest thing I read all week.
Bought one for my dad after your review. He typed "blue truck 1994" on the TV and found the truck he sold to pay for my braces.
A Fuse Box reader, Gary T., Mesa, Arizona
Street across from 214
Living room the TV on the wall
Search your photos by what's in them.
Joist looked at every photo once, at night, in the closet. Ask in plain words. The ranking and the reasons are worked out on the box, not on a server somewhere.
The TV asks the closet over your own Wi-Fi: TV, router, closet. Three steps, all inside the walls. Your search words never leave.
Each photo is marked with the pair of drives that holds it. A is drives 1 and 2; B is drives 3 and 4. Pull drives in the closet and watch these.
Joist Photosanswered by the closet
Why these, in this order
Living 18'6" × 14'0"
Hall closet second shelf, next to the towels
Pull a drive. Nothing is lost.
Every photo is written twice, to two different drives. Tap a drive to slide it out, the way you would if one failed.
One cable, to the router in the den. Joist has no Wi-Fi radio and no microphone, so there is nothing else for it to talk through.
Each square is one photo, in its own colors. Drives 1 and 2 hold the same squares; so do 3 and 4. That's the whole trick.
- 1Four bays for ordinary 3.5-inch drives.Bring your own, or we put them in. Swap one without tools.
- 2An 8-core chip with an AI engine.It reads new photos at night, about 9,000 an hour, and keeps what it learns on the drives.
- 3One Ethernet port. No Wi-Fi, no camera, no microphone.
- 418 watts while it waits.About $2 a month of electricity, and quieter than the fridge.
- 59 × 7 × 8 inches.The size of a shoebox, so it fits on the shelf.
Want a copy outside the house too? Pair Joist with a second box at a relative's place. The copy goes over encrypted, and their box can't open it.
Closet 4'0" × 3'2"
Den the router, on the desk under the window
Everything that crossed the property line last night.
Joist writes down every time it talks to anything outside the house. This is the whole list for Monday night. You can read yours the same way.
This window is where the dashed line leaves the house. Each line in the list is one crossing.
None of these crossings carried a photo from the drives, except the album you choose to share below.
Den 12'0" × 11'4"
Garage the workbench
Reserve yours. $49 holds it.
We're building the first run now. A deposit holds your place in line; the rest is charged the week it ships.
Setup needs one free port on your router. No account with us, no app login, no email address.
Mirroring halves the space: two copies of everything. The bars show what you buy against what you can fill.
- Refund any day before it ships. One button, no form, all $49 back.
- If we miss June 2027, your deposit comes back on its own, plus $20 for waiting.
- The price can't go up for anyone holding a place.
Move-in day, about 20 minutes.
- Put it on a shelf a cable can reach.Plug the cable into your router and the power into the wall.
- Open joist.local on your phone, or scan the code on the bottom. Your house's accounts live on the box, not with us.
- Point it at your photos.The Joist app backs up iPhones and Androids, and it takes iCloud Photos and Google Photos downloads, or any folder on a Mac or PC. It reads them overnight.
- Phones and computers
- iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, any web browser
- TVs
- Apple TV, Google TV, Roku, Fire TV
- Needs
- A router with one free Ethernet port. Software updates are free for seven years.
Garage 20'0" × 22'0"