REDDIT · REDDIT// 27d agoTUTORIAL

Open WebUI, Ollama replace Perplexity for free

A LocalLLaMA community tutorial walks through spinning up a self-hosted AI assistant with live web search using OpenWebUI, Ollama (or OpenRouter), and Brave Search's free tier — replicating Perplexity's core functionality at near-zero cost. The stack also supports local RAG via embedding models like nomic-embed-text.

// ANALYSIS

Perplexity's price hike is pushing power users toward self-hosted stacks, and this guide makes the barrier to entry surprisingly low.

–OpenWebUI acts as the unified interface, handling local models via Ollama and cloud models via OpenRouter from a single UI
–Brave Search's free tier (1,000 queries/month) is the path-of-least-resistance for web grounding — SearXNG is the fully-sovereign option for those who want it
–Adding a local embedding model like nomic-embed-text unlocks proper document RAG rather than naive keyword retrieval
–OpenRouter compatibility means any OpenAI-compatible API (Groq, etc.) can be swapped in, giving users flexibility over cost/privacy tradeoffs
–Low Reddit score (1 point, 3 comments) suggests early post, not community-validated yet — but the setup is technically sound

// TAGS

open-webuiollamaopen-sourceself-hostedragllmdevtool

DISCOVERED

27d ago

2026-03-16

PUBLISHED

27d ago

2026-03-15

RELEVANCE

6/ 10

AUTHOR

letsgoiowa