LocalGhost - Private Local AI Server | Your AI, Your Data, Your Hardware
THE MANIFESTO
"Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."
— A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993
The Cypherpunks told us to write code. We didn't write enough. Today, your phone is a tracker, your cloud is an informant, and your AI is a spy. Every click is logged, every query sold, every interaction feeding a model you will never own.
LocalGhost inverts this. We move everything you need, your AI, your data, your digital self, from their servers to yours. A private server on your own hardware, where nobody knows you exist.
We aren't asking you to trust us, we're asking you to verify that trust is unnecessary.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Everything is open source. No black boxes except the one on your desk.
We're blueprint makers rather than gatekeepers, and the mission is bigger than the company.
Buy the parts. Flash the OS. We'll still high-five and support you.
If we go bankrupt, you lose nothing. Your box keeps running. Someone else can pick up where we left off.
WHAT WE CANNOT DO
We do not have it. Your data lives on your hardware. We are architecturally blind.
There is no server to cut you off from. What you buy, you keep.
Unplug the ethernet and we cannot reach you. No backdoor. No kill switch.
Your journals, photos, biometrics, secrets exist only on your desk.
No analytics, no telemetry, and the box does not phone home, so we don't know who you are.
When the subpoena comes, we have nothing to hand over.
This is code you can read, math you can verify, and architecture that makes betrayal structurally impossible.
Our goodwill isn't the point, the fact that we are technically powerless to stop you is.
No remote dependencies, no server-side computation, and no way for us to betray you even if we wanted to.
THE FLEET: LOCAL DAEMONS
Eleven daemons ship in the current release, wisp 0.0.5, ten of them doing their whole job every day and ghost.shadowd with its first detector, and one more, ghost.mistd, is planned for poltergeist. Each is a small Go program with one job, so when one of them is wrong, the name of the daemon is the name of the bug. Apart from ghost.secd, they all live on the encrypted volume and exist only while it’s unlocked. Nothing of yours leaves the box. What it asks the internet for is public, from prices on the exchanges to the news when your phone is away and its own maps, models and releases from the signed mirror. Set one up yourself.
SURVIVAL PROTOCOL: "THE MIST"
Planned for poltergeist, the last release line on the roadmap. No code for it exists yet, and this is its design.
We do not have a server. If we go bankrupt tomorrow, your data survives. LocalGhost relies on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT).
┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ │ NODE │────▶│ NODE │────▶│ NODE │ └──┬───┘ └──┬───┘ └──┬───┘ │ │ │ ▼ ▼ ▼ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ │ NODE │◀────│ NODE │◀────│ NODE │ └──────┘ └──────┘ └──────┘ NO CENTRAL NODE. NO MASTER. JUST THE MESH.
THE PACT. Dedicate 20% of your drive to the network. Gain immortality for your data.
THE ECONOMICS OF INDEPENDENCE
Why we will never ask for a subscription.
The modern technology industry is built on a single toxic premise, rent-seeking.
They don't want to sell you a product, they want to trap you in a monthly payment and keep you as a tenant in your own digital life. If you stop paying, the lights go out and the doors lock on your memories.
We reject this. Not everything needs to be a subscription.
Our business model is boring, archaic, and honest.
1. WE MAKE MONEY WHEN WE SELL YOU HARDWARE
If you choose to buy a pre-built LocalGhost box from us, we charge you a 30% margin on the parts and assembly. That is our profit. It pays for our engineers, our electricity, and our coffee.
2. WE MAKE MONEY WHEN WE SELL YOU UPGRADES (SOFTWARE)
Software here is a tool rather than a service. If we develop a breakthrough new daemon, say a "ghost.voiced v2" with better reasoning, or a "ghost.medicald" module, we will put it in a package and put a price tag on it.
3. WE NEVER MONETIZE YOU
We cannot sell your data because we do not have it, cannot train AI on your life because we cannot see it, and cannot show you ads because the box has no ad server.
⚡ CODE, NOT PROMISES
The guarantee. If you don't buy an upgrade, your current version will keep working forever. We will never throttle, brick, or degrade your existing system to force an upgrade.
Why? Because we can't.
Once you unplug the ethernet cable or block the port, this box is an independent island. We have no backdoor, no remote kill switch, no admin access. Even if we wanted to force an update, the architecture prevents us from reaching you.
We have designed ourselves out of the loop. The architecture is the guarantee, not the company behind it.
THE COMPARISON
| FEATURE | THE "BIG TECH" WAY | THE LOCALGHOST WAY |
|---|---|---|
| Payment Structure | Infinite Monthly Rent | One-Time Purchase |
| If You Stop Paying | You lose access to your data | Nothing happens. It keeps working. |
| Data Privacy | They scan it for ads/training | We physically cannot see it |
| Upgrades | Forced UI changes you hate | Optional packages you choose |
| Hardware | A locked black box you can't open | Standard parts. Repairable. Upgradeable. |
| Relationship | User / Product | Owner / Tool |
When you pay for something once you own it, and when you pay monthly it owns you.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Where an answer describes something that isn't built yet, it names the release line it's planned for, and the roadmap lists them all. What the current release, wisp 0.0.5, does today is on the About page and in its release notes.
Okay, but what actually IS it? +
Today it's software you run on a machine of your own, a Debian 13 computer with a TPM and a spare disk, much faster with an NVIDIA card, and an Android app that's the only way in. Set Up a Box has the whole setup. You install the app, run the guided setup on the box, scan the QR it draws and unlock with your PIN. There's no cloud account, no login page and no web interface.
From there the phone syncs your photos, videos, location trail, health data, notes and voice notes to the box. The box keeps them on an encrypted volume, describes and tags them with models running on its own hardware, and gives them back on the phone as days, places, memories and answers.
A small, silent box we build and sell, with the same software and nothing else to set up, is the plan. Nothing is on sale yet.
How do I get my data onto it? +
- The phone app. Photos, videos, the location trail, Health Connect data, notes, voice notes and the daily check-in, synced in the background
- Text and email. Files dropped into ghost.noted's inbox on the box, emails saved as .eml included
- Planned. Imports of bank, fitness and other exports through ghost.tallyd's parsers come in shade (1.x), and a browser extension in phantom
Everything goes straight from the phone to your box, over your home network or through your own domain, never through our servers, because we don't have any that hold your data.
What does the AI actually do? +
The models run on the box, on its GPU when it has one and its CPU when it doesn't (Gemma 4 12B for descriptions and chat, EmbeddingGemma for search, Whisper for voice notes). In wisp 0.0.5 they do these things.
- Describing and tagging. Every photo gets a description and tags in eleven categories, so you can find it later by what's in it
- Days and memories. A short story of each day from the photos, the trail, the health data and the check-in, the places you keep going back to, and facts from your notes and chats, each one yours to edit or delete
- Search and chat. Ask about your own life and it answers from your archive, with the sources it used listed under the answer
- Noticing. Once a day it writes up a habit or a change from the last few weeks, kept only when every number in it came from your data
- Arguing back. ghost.shadowd, the critic, runs its first detector. Correlations like sleep against spending wait for the bank and fitness parsers planned for shade
The key difference is that this AI has zero incentive to manipulate you. It can't sell you anything, can't show you ads, can't optimise for "engagement." It just tells you the truth.
Why do you call them daemons and not agents? +
Because that's what they are. Daemon is the Unix word for a long-running background process that responds to events and requests, and it's been the word since the 1960s. sshd, systemd, cron are daemons. The LocalGhost fleet is the same kind of thing, processes that sit on your box, expose APIs, do their job, and stop.
Agent has come to mean something else. In 2026 it's the industry's word for an LLM in a loop, where the model decides what to do next, composes its own tool calls, and the surrounding code is scaffolding for whatever it comes up with. The whole pitch is that you don't enumerate the steps in advance. That's the architecture, and it's the architecture that carries the autonomy and trust-us framing.
LocalGhost daemons work the other way around. The daemon owns the control flow. It runs predefined steps in a defined order, and when it needs language work done, it calls a local LLM the same way another daemon would call Postgres. Sometimes it asks the model which of N predefined steps to run next, the model picks from a fixed menu, the daemon executes the choice. The model never writes the menu. It never invents a step. It never gets handed the keys.
A daemon that uses Postgres is still a daemon. A daemon that uses a local LLM is still a daemon. The model is a dependency, not the driver.
The word matters because the connotations matter. Daemons are infrastructure. Agents are something you're asked to trust. LocalGhost is built so you don't have to.
How does "The Mist" backup system work? +
Planned for poltergeist. It's the last release line on the roadmap, and no code for The Mist exists yet. This is the design.
The Mist is a peer-to-peer backup network. Here's the simple version.
Step 1, shred. Your data gets encrypted with a key only you hold. Then it gets chopped into thousands of tiny pieces called "shards." Each shard is meaningless on its own, like confetti from a shredded document.
Step 2, scatter. Those shards get distributed across other LocalGhost boxes in the network. Your shards live on dozens of strangers' drives. Their shards live on yours.
Step 3, rebuild. When you need your data back, your box collects the shards from the network and reassembles them. Only your encryption key can make sense of them.
The beauty of it. The people storing your shards can't read them, they're encrypted and incomplete. You can't read theirs either. Nobody knows whose data they're holding. The network doesn't even know you exist.
If your house burns down, your data survives. If LocalGhost goes bankrupt, your data survives. The network has no central point of failure.
Technical note. This uses erasure coding similar to how Ethereum's PeerDAS works for data availability sampling. We use Reed-Solomon encoding so you only need around 50% of shards to reconstruct your data, making the system resilient even if half the network goes offline.
How do the boxes find each other without a central server? +
Planned for poltergeist. It's the last release line on the roadmap, and no code for The Mist exists yet. This is the design.
This is the magic of distributed hash tables (DHT). Here's how it works in plain English.
The bootstrap problem. When your box first connects to the network, it needs to know at least one other box. We publish a small list of "bootstrap nodes," these are just regular LocalGhost boxes run by volunteers who've agreed to be discoverable. Your box contacts one of these to get introduced to the network. After that, it never needs us again.
The address book. Every box on the network has a unique ID (a long random number). Each box maintains a partial "address book" of other boxes it knows about. But here's the clever bit, you don't need to know everyone. You just need to know boxes whose IDs are "close" to yours in the mathematical sense.
The hop game. When you need to find a specific shard, you ask the boxes you know who's closest to this shard's ID. They point you to someone closer. You ask that box the same question. Within 3-4 hops, you've found what you're looking for, even in a network of millions.
No phone book server. There's no central directory. The network is the directory. If any box goes offline, the others route around it automatically. The more boxes join, the more resilient it gets.
Think of it like asking for directions in a city with no street signs. You ask a local, they point you to someone who knows better, and within a few asks you're at your destination. No map company required.
Technical note. We use a Kademlia-style DHT, the same algorithm that powers BitTorrent and IPFS. Node distance is calculated using XOR on node IDs. Each node maintains k-buckets of peers at exponentially increasing distances, giving O(log n) lookup time. The protocol is UDP-based for speed, with optional QUIC tunneling for NAT traversal.
What if I lose my encryption key? +
Then your data is gone, and that's by design. We never had access to it, so there's no "forgot password" flow and no support ticket that can bring it back.
Today, in wisp 0.0.5. The volume key is sealed to your box's TPM, or wrapped by your PIN on a machine without one, and there's no recovery path yet. A dead board or a forgotten PIN loses the archive on that disk, so keep the originals of anything you can't lose somewhere else as well.
Coming in shade (1.x) at the earliest, not in wisp. The plan is two hardware security keys per box, and boxes we sell are meant to come with them. At setup you plug both in, and the box makes the master key and splits it between them with Shamir's Secret Sharing, so neither key alone can decrypt anything.
- Key 1. Kept with the box for daily use.
- Key 2. Kept somewhere safe and separate, a bank vault, a trusted friend's house, your parents' place. This is the recovery key.
If you lose Key 1, Key 2 makes a new pair. If your house burns down with the box and Key 1 inside, Key 2 restores everything to a new box. If you lose both, it's game over.
Technical note. The planned keys are FIDO2 hardware tokens with secure elements. The master key never leaves the secure element and only derived keys are used at runtime, with a 2-of-2 split and an optional 2-of-3 mode with a third key.
Can I access my box when I'm not home? +
Yes. Point a domain you own at your home connection and forward port 443 on your router to the box, and the phone reaches it from anywhere over mutual TLS, with the certificate the box gave it at enrolment.
The phone trusts the box by its certificate's fingerprint and the box trusts the phone by its client certificate, so nothing in between, including us, can read or change the traffic. Anyone without a certificate the box issued gets the same 503 a server that's down would give.
Or keep it at home.
Leave the domain out and the box answers only on your home network. When you leave, it's a black hole.
When you return, it's there waiting.
There is no option where your data goes through our servers. We don't have servers that hold your data, so we couldn't offer one if we wanted to.
What happens if LocalGhost (the company) disappears? +
Nothing. Your box keeps working.
The software is open source. The hardware is standard parts. The Mist, planned for poltergeist, is designed with no centre. There is no license server to phone home to. There is no authentication service to validate your purchase.
If we go bankrupt tomorrow, here's what that looks like.
- Your box continues running the last version you installed
- The Mist, once it lands in poltergeist, keeps running without us, since it has no central server
- Someone else can fork the code and continue development
- You can maintain it yourself if you're technical
- Everything a box downloads is on the signed setup mirror, and anyone can copy it and host it, or keep it on a USB disk
We have deliberately designed ourselves out of the critical path. Your independence does not depend on our survival.
Is this legal? +
Yes. Running a private server in your home is legal, encrypting your own data is legal, and storing backups on a peer-to-peer network is legal.
We're not helping you hide anything from the law. We're helping you exercise your right to privacy, a right that exists in most democracies but has been quietly eroded by decades of "free" services that monetize your attention and data.
If law enforcement comes to us with a warrant, we'll comply. Compliance looks like this. "We have no data, no logs, and we don't know who uses our hardware. Here's our open-source code. Good luck."
The architecture is the legal defence.
THE BLACK BOX
Planned for specter, after the software is stable, and nothing is on sale. The spec below is the design and will change before launch. Today LocalGhost runs on a machine of your own, and Set Up a Box says how.
We do not manufacture silicon. We do not print circuit boards in a secret facility. We source the best off-the-shelf components we can find, verify them for backdoors, flash our OS, and bolt them into a case.
This is a "Bill of Materials" product. We use standard parts you could buy yourself. The value we add is the integration, the thermal engineering, the OS configuration, and the guarantee that the components work together flawlessly. Final specs will be published before launch.
Believe in the mission? You can always support development directly.