Most writing on this question is produced by people who want the answer to be yes. Here is the version with the noes in it, because the noes are more useful.
When it is clearly worth it
When the material cannot leave. Client files under privilege, patient records, anything held under a confidentiality obligation you did not write and cannot vary. For some professions this decides the question outright, and nothing about a hosted service resolves it.
When the archive is the point. If what you want is an assistant that knows twenty years of your own paperwork, the material has to be readable by something. A machine of your own is the only arrangement where that does not mean sending it away.
When it has to work without the internet. Rarer than people claim, but real: a site with poor connectivity, or work that must continue through an outage.
When you are tired of being a systems administrator. Not about privacy at all. Some people simply want the thing to work and to be somebody else's job. A managed arrangement answers that; a self-built one emphatically does not.
When it is clearly not worth it
When you mainly want general knowledge. If your use is drafting, summarising, translating and asking about the world, a hosted assistant at a few dollars a month is better and cheaper, and will stay better. Buying a machine to do that would be a mistake and we would tell you so.
When you have very little material. The value here comes from an archive. If yours is a few hundred documents, there is not enough for training to produce much you could not get by attaching a folder to a hosted chat.
When you enjoy building it yourself. Genuinely: if assembling the hardware and tuning the models is the interesting part for you, do that. You will spend less and learn more, and a managed service is the wrong purchase.
When nobody will own it internally. For a firm, this matters more than the money. If no one is going to decide which contract version is authoritative or what is in scope, the assistant will be trained on contradictions and blamed for repeating them.
The middle, and the test for it
Most people are in the middle: some sensitive material, a decent archive, no strong feelings about hardware.
The test we would apply is not about privacy or price. It is this: is there a question you want to ask that you currently cannot ask anything?
If you can name three — what did the roof work cost, who has not replied, what changed in the new contract — the material is doing real work and this is probably worth it. If you cannot name any, the honest recommendation is to wait. Wanting a better assistant in general is not the same as having questions only your own records can answer.
The money, plainly
$8,995 the first year — everything included. $4,995 each year after. Before it, if you like, the Archive Assessment: $1,950, credited in full. The first year costs more because it contains the Jetson Orin placed and configured, your archive loaded and the first training run; every year after is the service running.
Against a stack of hosted subscriptions that is not a saving in year one, and we have never claimed it is. What you are buying is that your material can be used at all, plus the fact that none of it is your job.
And the machine stays ours; nothing becomes yours alone. If the service ends, we collect it and delete the trained model, confirmed in writing. There is no asset at the end of the year, which is a real reduction in what the year buys, and it is better to know that now than to discover it later.
How to find out cheaply
The smaller first step is a written scope of your own material for $1,950 — what can be trained on, what cannot, and a working demonstration built on a sample of your own papers. You keep both whichever way you decide, and if we can see we cannot serve you well we decline and return it.
That exists precisely so this question can be answered with evidence instead of a brochure.
Local AI. Private data. Local training.
$8,995 the first year — everything included. $4,995 each year after. The first year costs more because it contains the Jetson Orin placed and configured, your archive loaded and the first training run; every year after is the service running.
Or add the Archive Assessment first — $1,950, credited in full
You order and pay at checkout; we write back within days — a decline returns every dollar, and until our letter confirms the year you may withdraw in writing. From that letter the year is final, and it arrives on the date the letter names. Prefer to write to us first?