kowais915/localbrain

Localbrain is a tool that lets you add AI features to your app without paying for a cloud service like OpenAI. You run a single command, and it downloads a small open-source AI model to your own machine, sets up a local connection point, and wires it into your project. The result is an AI that runs on your computer for free, with no API key and no per-request billing. The project is built in two parts. The first is a command-line tool you run with npx localbrain that detects your setup, picks the best model for your hardware, downloads it, and connects it to your app. The second is a lightweight client library your code imports to talk to that model. The client has zero dependencies and uses a simple HTTP request to the local endpoint, which means it installs quickly and adds almost no bulk to your project. The client library gives you a handful of functions for common tasks. You can classify text into categories, extract structured data from freeform text, summarize longer passages, run a chat prompt, and generate embeddings for semantic search. The endpoint is also compatible with the OpenAI format, so any tool or library already built to talk to OpenAI can point at localbrain instead, with no API key required. The README is clear about what the tool is good for and what it is not. It excels at high-volume, straightforward tasks like tagging, extraction, and summaries. It is not meant to replace large models for deep reasoning or multi-step problem solving. It also does not run well on serverless platforms, since the model needs an actual machine to live on. For desktop or local-first apps, the model runs on each user's device, keeping data private and costs at zero. For hosted web apps, you pay for your own server but still avoid per-token API fees. The full README is longer than what was shown.