v0.1.0 alpha · BSL 1.1 · self-hosted
An open-source personal AI that runs on your machine, reaches you on Signal, and validates its own nightly improvements against tests it cannot cheat. Single-user by design. Sandboxed plugins. 12,600 lines you can read in an afternoon.
Self-host on your Linux server. Read the install script first.
Hosted, managed, $49/mo + tokens. Coming soon.
Demo video lands when launch artifact is recorded.
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GitHub stars
live
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Self-hosters
opt-in telemetry
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% Kwisai written by Kwisai
self-improvement loop
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Nights survived on maintainer's box
continuous uptime
All numbers will go live from the /open dashboard.
What is different
Every night, Kwisai proposes code changes to its own behavior, replays them against a golden dataset of your past conversations, and accepts or reverts on a six-dimension empirical score. Every change lands in git. Your AI gets better because you used it, not because a team on the other side of the world retrained a shared model.
/why §5
Every third-party plugin runs in an OS-level sandbox: a child process with a blocked filesystem, a blocked network, and a capped memory budget. SES compartments, bwrap, and cgroups, stacked. The worst case is a locked room, not arbitrary code on your box.
/why §4
Kwisai is three specialist agents: a fast Haiku for simple things, a Sonnet for code work, an Opus for deep research. A three-tier router decides which agent gets each message, and a daily cron teaches the cheap tiers to handle more of tomorrow's traffic. Ninety percent of what you ask costs pennies.
/why §2
Thesis
Personal AI should run on your machine, be reachable through the messaging app you already use, improve itself nightly against tests it cannot cheat, and stay out of the cloud, including ours.
Two paths
No guilt about either choice. The same Kwisai, two operating models.
| Attribute | Self-host | Kwisai Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 software · ~$5–20/mo VPS | $49/mo + tokens at provider rates |
| Hardware | You bring a Linux server | Included |
| Setup time | ~2 hours | ~2 minutes |
| Where data lives | On your machine, in SQLite | Dedicated EU instance we operate |
| LLM tokens | Your API key | Your API key, billed at cost |
| Updates | git pull | Managed |
| License | BSL 1.1, source visible | Commercial use granted |
Read every line
Auditable in an afternoon. Forkable in a weekend. The plumbing is ordinary Node.js: an Express-flavored gateway, BullMQ queue, SQLite, Pino logging. The interesting part is the architecture.
kwisai/
├─ gateway/ Node.js + TypeScript core
│ ├─ src/agents/ 3-tier router · adapters
│ ├─ src/plugins/ SES compartments · RPC
│ ├─ src/jobs/ Self-improvement loop
│ ├─ src/queue/ BullMQ + Redis
│ └─ src/db/ SQLite session store
├─ webui/ SvelteKit chat client
├─ caddy/ Reverse proxy + TLS
└─ scripts/ install.sh · backup · auditHonest answers
No. v0.1.0 alpha. Run it on a server you can reformat without crying. The Cloud waitlist is for people who want to wait until it is.
Each version converts to Apache 2.0 after two years. BSL prevents third parties from offering Kwisai Cloud as a hosted service while we build the business. You can self-host commercially, fork it, study it, contribute to it. Read the license page.
A scheduled job analyzes recent conversations, proposes code changes, runs them against a golden dataset of past interactions, scores them on cost, conversation quality, error rate, and four other dimensions, and either commits or reverts. You see every change in git. You can pause or veto the loop at any time.
On your server: the gateway, plugin sandboxes, message queue, session store, voice transcription (Whisper), the self-improvement loop. In the cloud: only the LLM provider you choose (Anthropic, OpenRouter, or your own Ollama instance). Your conversations never leave your machine except as prompts to the LLM you configured.
Sysadmin-developers. People comfortable with systemd, Docker is optional, Caddy, journalctl. If you do not run your own server today, Kwisai Cloud will be friendlier when it ships.
Linux only. Tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Other distributions should work; macOS and Windows are not supported and are not on the roadmap.