The honest comparisons

There are three ways people get real help from AI: rent an app, build a machine themselves, or join a service like this one. All three are legitimate. This page lays out where each one wins, plainly, so you can tell which fits your life — and if the answer is not us, we will say so, in writing, before our letter confirms a year.

Against renting AI apps

An app is a place you visit. This lives with you. The apps bill you every month, forever — about $40–60 a month for a typical household’s two or three tools, past $100 for a power user — and your questions live on their computers, under their rules. The service is one price a year that includes the machine, the care, and your archive loaded; the everyday work happens in your building, and the machine stays ours. The apps are still the right choice if you dip into AI now and then and hand it nothing private. If the same work comes back every week and runs on your own papers — or the papers are your clients’, and must not leave the building — the service wins.

The full side-by-side with the AI apps →

Against building it yourself

Here is the honest version: a capable person absolutely can build a private AI machine. People do it with a hobby board, a small desktop computer, a tower with a big graphics card, or a rented server, and for some of them the building is the fun. If that is you, build — sincerely.

What the build actually costs

The parts run from about $150 for a board-and-case starter that will crawl at AI work, to $600–$1,200 or more for a tower that can really do it — plus a full weekend of assembly, and more evenings every time something updates. A tower also brings fan noise you will hear and a power bill you will notice, which is why those machines end up in the basement. A rented server moves the project into a data center but adds a bill with no end date, and your files move to a building in another state.

What no build gives you

The loading

Your years of records read in, organized, and made answerable — done for you before the machine ships, as part of joining. A self-built machine starts blank and mostly stays that way.

The care

Updates, health checks, and backups, handled quietly by us. On a self-built machine, every one of those is a Saturday.

Someone accountable

Written support from the service that keeps your machine healthy — replies within one business day. The alternative is a forum, when someone answers.

A machine whose health is someone’s job

This is the quiet reason home builds fade: they work until the person who built them gets busy. Ours is our job — it never has to become yours.

The honest trade: a self-built tower with a big graphics card has more raw headroom than our machine, and building can cost less up front if you already own good parts. What the service buys is everything around the machine — the loading, the training, the care, the support — and a model trained on your own material that no one else can use. The machine itself stays ours to maintain, for as long as you want the service.

Which configuration fits you?

One service, one price. $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. One home under one roof, or one practice in one office, is the first year — however many of you there are. Several homes, several offices, or staff spread across sites: by conversation, scoped in writing. Not sure which you are? Order the first year; if it needs more, our letter says so before anything is final.

The service is annual, bought directly, and everything-included. The machine stays ours to place, maintain and replace; nothing becomes yours alone. The model trained on your material serves you and nobody else while the service runs, and is deleted, confirmed in writing, when it ends. The Archive Assessment ($1,950) is delivered work you keep, credited in full against the first year.

Still weighing it? Write to us first — if it is not right for you, we will say so, in writing, before our letter confirms a year.

See what it costs vs the AI apps

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.

Begin the first year — $8,995

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?