PrivAI brings self-hosted AI search

A solo dev's direct response to Perplexity gutting its pro plan — the pitch is simple: same research-style AI search, but your queries never touch a big cloud provider.

• –Runs on the developer's own hardware, not AWS or GCP — strong privacy guarantee, though it does require trusting an indie operator rather than a vendor with a formal privacy policy
• –Feature set punches above its weight: PDF chat, sandboxed Docker code execution, parallel research agents, voice input, and live HTML/CSS preview generation
• –Built-in AI content detector is a differentiator — useful for researchers who need to verify the provenance of generated text
• –Completely free with no stated monetization plan — raises real questions about long-term infrastructure sustainability
• –Minimal community traction so far (1 upvote, 0 comments on LocalLLaMA), so this is firmly pre-discovery