Every device in your home. Ads gone.
Holdfast is a small brick that plugs into your router and blocks ads and trackers on every phone, TV, and laptop in the house. No app installs per device, no subscriptions, no cloud account — your data never leaves your home.
Runs on a Raspberry Pi you can hold in one hand. Open source, top to bottom.
How it works
Three steps, in order
This is a real sequence — each step builds on the one before it. Most people are done inside an afternoon.
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Plug it in
Connect the brick to any LAN port on your router with an ethernet cable and plug in the power. Give it a minute to boot. Wired on purpose — the brick serves your whole network, so it never depends on WiFi.
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Pair the app
Open the iOS companion app on the same WiFi. It finds the brick on your network by itself — you just enter the 6-digit pairing code printed at the end of the install.
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Whole home protected
Turn on whole-home protection in the app. A guided flow checks your network and hands address duty to the brick — after that every device is covered automatically, including guests.
Straight answers
What it blocks — and what it can't
The brick runs AdGuard Home with encrypted DNS lookups (DNS-over-TLS via Unbound). That covers a lot. It doesn't cover everything, and we'd rather tell you now.
What it kills
- Web ads, on every browser in the house
- In-app banner ads on phones and tablets
- Trackers and telemetry phoning home
- Smart-TV home-screen ads
What it can't promise
In-stream video ads on streaming services — Disney+, Hulu, YouTube — are stitched into the video on the server side. DNS blocking can't reliably remove them — it's hit-or-miss depending on the service, device, and blocklist.
If a product promises otherwise, ask how. We'd rather be the brick that's honest about it.
Build it yourself for about $70–90
A Raspberry Pi, an SD card, one ethernet cable, and a free afternoon. The setup guide walks through every step — flashing the card, one install script, pairing the app.
Rather skip the SD card?
The pre-built Holdfast Brick kit arrives pre-flashed and pre-configured. Plug it into your router, open the app, scan the pairing code — done.
The cost of the parts, plus $50 flat. That's the whole pricing model.