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
In 1993 the Cypherpunks said privacy would exist only if people wrote the code for it, and not enough of us did. Thirty-odd years later the phone keeps a log of everywhere you've been, the cloud keeps your photos under terms it can change, and the assistant you talk to most keeps a better record of how you think than you do (and it isn't yours).
LocalGhost moves that record home. Your photos, notes, voice notes and health data, and the memory a model builds from them, live on a box you own, which answers your phone and gives everyone else the same 503 a dead server would.
Don't take our word for any of it. The code is open, and every line below is something you can check.
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.
Install Debian, run the release, and we'll still high-five you (and read your bug reports).
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 don't have it. It lives on your box, and there's no server of ours for it to reach.
There is no server to cut you off from. What you buy, you keep.
The box updates when you tell it to, from the phone or the shell. There's no back door and no kill switch, and with the cable out it doesn't know we exist.
Your journals, photos, biometrics, secrets exist only on your desk.
No analytics and no telemetry. Once a day the phone reads the mirror's manifest to look for a new release, and the mirror keeps no log of who asked.
We'll answer a warrant like anyone else, and all we hold is the code (already public), any email you've sent us, and on the mail relay, mail waiting for a box, sealed so only that box can open it, and mail a box has sent until it's delivered.
None of this depends on us staying nice. The code is MIT-licensed, the box trusts only the certificates it issued itself, and there's no account on our side for anyone to switch off.
If we ever turn into the company we're warning you about, your box keeps running the version you installed and anyone can fork the rest.
Nothing of yours leaves the box unless you send it. What it asks the internet for is public (prices, news, maps, the weather models every box pulls, its own updates), apart from a heights download that tells the mirror roughly which region you're in, and mail, if you give the box an address, comes through our relay sealed to the box's key. The privacy page lists every request.
THE FLEET // LOCAL DAEMONS
Eleven daemons ship in the current release, wisp 0.0.7, 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
The Mist is a design. It belongs to the last release line on the roadmap, no code for it exists yet, and when it does, residents are asked not to make it the only copy of anything.
The Mist is how a box would survive a house fire. It encrypts its own backup, cuts it into shards and spreads them over other people's boxes, found through a distributed hash table (DHT), so there's no server of ours in the middle and nothing for a bankruptcy to switch off.
┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ │ NODE │────▶│ NODE │────▶│ NODE │ └──┬───┘ └──┬───┘ └──┬───┘ │ │ │ ▼ ▼ ▼ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ │ NODE │◀────│ NODE │◀────│ NODE │ └──────┘ └──────┘ └──────┘ NO CENTRAL NODE. EVERY BOX IS A PEER.
THE PACT, AS DESIGNED. Give the network a fifth of your disk, and it keeps your shards alive for as long as there are boxes.
THE ECONOMICS OF INDEPENDENCE
Why we will never ask for a subscription.
Most software now wants a monthly payment, and the price of stopping is your own photos and notes. Stop paying and the lights go out on them, in a building you were only ever renting.
LocalGhost won't have a subscription, and the business model is boring on purpose.
1. WE MAKE MONEY WHEN WE SELL YOU HARDWARE
When the pre-built box goes on sale (planned for specter), it'll cost the parts and the assembly plus a 30% margin. That margin is the profit, and it pays for the work, the electricity and a lot of coffee.
2. WE MAKE MONEY WHEN WE SELL YOU UPGRADES (SOFTWARE)
If we build a new daemon worth paying for (say a ghost.medicald that reads your lab results), it'll come as a one-off package with a price on it, and the core stays free and MIT-licensed.
3. WE NEVER MONETISE 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 never buy anything else, what you have keeps working. We couldn't throttle or brick it if we tried, because the box takes an update only when you run one, there's no admin account of ours on it, and unplugged it carries on as if we'd never existed.
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 |
The price of a box isn't set yet. The About page will say it first when it is.
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 0.0.7, does today is on the About page and in its release notes.
Okay, but what 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, the calendar and contacts, 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, and since wisp 0.0.7 mail sent to the box's own address
- 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. The one thing that passes a server of ours is the box's mail, which our relay seals to the box's key the moment it arrives.
What does the AI 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 0.0.7 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
Nobody makes money when you spend longer talking to it, so it has no reason to flatter you. It can still be wrong, which is why every answer lists what it used.
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, answer each other over local sockets, 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 code around it is scaffolding for whatever it comes up with. The pitch is that nobody writes the steps down in advance, and that's where the trust-us part comes from.
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, and the daemon runs the choice. The model never writes the menu, never adds a step and never gets handed the keys.
The word matters to me because an agent is something you're asked to trust, and 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, and what follows is the design.
The Mist is a peer-to-peer backup network, in three steps.
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.
Why it stays private. 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.
The design is for a house fire and a bankruptcy to cost you nothing, since the network has no central point to fail.
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, and what follows is the design.
The boxes would find each other through a distributed hash table (DHT), the same idea BitTorrent has run on for twenty years.
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 keeps a partial "address book" of other boxes it knows about. It doesn't need to know everyone, only the boxes whose IDs are "close" to its own 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. Every box holds a piece of the directory and nobody holds all of it. If a box goes offline the others route around it, and the more boxes join, the harder it is to break.
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 tunnelling 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 0.0.7. 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, so away from home the phone can't
reach it at all, and it picks up again when you're back on your Wi-Fi.
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, and there's no licence server or authentication service for the box to phone home to. The Mist, planned for poltergeist, is designed with no centre either.
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 setup downloads is on the signed setup mirror, and anyone can copy it and host it, or keep it on a USB disk
We've designed ourselves out of the critical path on purpose.
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.
It's built for the ordinary right to privacy, which most democracies recognise and which decades of "free" services have worn down by selling attention and data. It won't help anyone break the law.
If law enforcement comes to us with a warrant, we'll comply, and compliance looks like this. "We have no data of yours, no access logs, and we don't know who uses our software. Here's our open-source code. Good luck."
THE TOWER
The tower we build and sell is planned for specter, after the software is stable. The parts below are the reference build and will change before launch, so please don't queue. Today LocalGhost runs on a machine of your own, and Set Up a Box says how.
It's a plain tower of parts you can order from anywhere, cobbled together rather than designed, because the parts that matter are the graphics card and the disks and everything else is there to hold them up. It's the build from The Expensive Part Was Never the AI, priced new in June 2026, and the card is the one part you swap as they get faster.
Every part above is something you could buy yourself, at the price next to it. What we'd add is the assembly, the install and the testing that says the parts work together, for the 30% margin in the economics above. Expect a fan you can hear and a few cable ties (it lives under a desk, it isn't a design object). The final parts list goes up before launch.
Believe in the mission? You can always support development directly.