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Starting in Brisbane · In development

Old laptops don't die.
They join the Junk Net.

Junk Net turns the laptops gathering dust in your drawer into a free, community-owned cloud. Every donated machine becomes a storage node in a mesh network. Donate a laptop, get free object storage. No subscriptions. No lock-in. Just junk, working together.

Donate a laptop See how it works

One person's junk is a whole community's cloud

  • Rescue a laptop

    That laptop in the drawer still works — it's just slow, old, or unloved. We wipe it, health-check it, and give it a new job: storage node.

    Donate a laptop

  • Get free storage

    Contribute a machine and you get S3-compatible object storage in return. Back up your photos, host your files, keep your data in your own community.

    Use your storage

  • Join the mesh

    Nodes connect over an encrypted Nebula mesh and pool their disks with Garage, an object store built for exactly this kind of scrappy hardware.

    The architecture

  • Own it together

    Junk Net is free and community-owned. No venture capital, no "sunsetting your plan" emails. If the community runs it, the community keeps it.

    The cause

The idea in 60 seconds

  1. You donate an old laptop. Anything reasonably modern that still powers on. We securely wipe it — every byte of your old data is destroyed.

  2. It becomes a node. We install the Junk Net OS image. The machine joins an encrypted mesh network and offers its disk to the cluster.

  3. The cluster pools the storage. Garage spreads three copies of every object across different machines in different homes, so no single dead laptop (or house fire) loses data.

  4. You get free storage. An S3-compatible endpoint and your own access keys. Works with the tools you already know — rclone, AWS CLI, Cyberduck, or any S3 library.

Why Tank Girl?

Because the aesthetic fits. A tank bolted together from scrap, driven with attitude, that somehow works better than the shiny stuff. Junk Net is infrastructure with the same energy: built from what everyone else threw away, owned by nobody's shareholders.

Why this matters

  • Less e-waste

    Making a new laptop emits hundreds of kilograms of CO₂ before it's ever switched on. The greenest computer is the one that already exists — so let's keep it working.

  • Free means free

    Cloud storage prices only ever ratchet up. Junk Net storage is free for contributors, forever. The "payment" is the laptop you weren't using anyway.

  • Local & sovereign

    Your data lives on machines in your own community — not in a hyperscaler's data centre on another continent, subject to someone else's terms of service.

Starting in Brisbane

The first Junk Net cluster is being built in Brisbane, Australia. If you're local and have a laptop to donate — or you want to host a node at your place — we'd love to hear from you.

Join the Brisbane pilot

Junk Net is in development

This project is being actively built and the pilot cluster is not yet open for general use. Nothing here comes with an SLA — read Trust & safety before storing anything you can't afford to lose. Follow the roadmap to see where things are at.