Binions is a self-hosted automation platform. It connects the tools your business already relies on — email, databases, web APIs, file storage, AI models, and even industrial hardware — and lets you wire them together into automated workflows called playbooks. The whole platform runs on a single Linux machine and installs with a familiar apt install.
Self-hosted by design. Binions runs entirely on infrastructure you control — a Raspberry Pi*, a virtual machine, or a bare-metal server. Your data, credentials, and automations never leave your host.
| What it is | A self-hosted automation & integration platform |
| How you install it | apt install from a signed package repository |
| Where it runs | One Linux host — from a Raspberry Pi 4* (2 GB) to a rack server |
| How you automate | Short YAML playbooks — no programming required |
| Footprint | A modest RAM footprint — the full platform runs comfortably on a machine with 1 GB of RAM |
| Built with | Pure Rust — small, fast, predictable, no runtime to manage |
| Licensing | Free for one set on one host (non-commercial); paid sets are £1 per binion — £13 per host (one-time) |
Under the hood, Binions is a small suite of focused background services — we call them daemons. Each daemon does one job well: sending and receiving email, calling a web API, running a database query, moving a file, talking to an AI model, or reading an industrial sensor. The daemons talk to each other over a fast internal event bus, so the platform behaves like one coordinated system.
You never program the daemons directly. Instead, you describe what should happen in a short, readable YAML playbook, and Binions coordinates the daemons to make it happen:
The big idea. Apps and hardware emit events; playbooks turn those events into actions. That single pattern covers everything from invoicing to factory-floor monitoring.
Because the building blocks are generic, the same platform handles very different jobs:
See Common use cases for worked examples.
| Principle | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Self-hosted first | Everything runs on your own host. No vendor cloud, no per-task fees, no data leaving your network. |
| One host, no cluster | The whole stack lives on a single machine and talks over localhost. There is no Kubernetes, no message broker to babysit. |
| Tiny & fast | Written in Rust, the full platform is small and fast, answering health checks in well under a millisecond. |
| A few generic verbs | Instead of thousands of app-specific connectors, Binions uses a small set of generic actions (such as “send a webhook” or “run a query”) that work with any compatible service. |
| Runs anywhere | The same packages run on a Raspberry Pi* or a production server — there are no crippled “editions” to choose between. |
| Industrial-ready | Native MODBUS support (TCP and RTU-over-TCP) brings factory hardware into the same automations as your email and APIs. |
Binions sits alongside familiar automation tools, but with a different trade-off: maximum control and efficiency on your own hardware, in exchange for a code-and-config workflow rather than a drag-and-drop canvas.
| Binions | Cloud tools (Zapier / Make) | n8n (self-hosted) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Your own host | Vendor cloud | Your own host |
| Your data | Stays on your host | Sent to the vendor | Stays on your host |
| How you build | YAML playbooks + CLI | Drag-and-drop | Drag-and-drop |
| Industrial (MODBUS) | Built in | No | Community add-on |
| Pricing model | One-off £1 per binion, per host | Per-task subscription | Subscription / self-host |
Good to know. Binions is aimed at people comfortable with SSH and a text editor. If you need a point-and-click canvas, or thousands of ready-made connector tiles, a GUI tool may suit you better — see Who is Binions for for an honest fit check.
The unit of licensing is a set — one complete installation of Binions on one host. You can run one set on one host for free for non-commercial use under the End-User Licence Agreement. Commercial use, or running more than one set, requires a paid licence — pricing is simple and fixed at £1 per binion (£13 for the 13-binion set), a one-time purchase per host. Full details, plans, and activation steps live in Licensing & Purchase.
* Raspberry Pi and other 64-bit ARM hardware are supported from the public 1.0 release. Current packages target 64-bit x86 (amd64) only.