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 very good assistant for everyone, which is another way of saying it is nobody’s in particular. 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 — your questions live on their computers, under their terms, and every conversation starts from nothing. The service is one price a year for one assistant that is yours alone: your records prepared and loaded by hand under a written scope, answers that cite your own documents, and an encrypted space of your own in our private cloud on Amazon Web Services — never pooled, never shared, never used to train anyone else’s model. One price covers the household or the whole office; there is no per-person charge. 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 sit under someone else’s terms — 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 the setup, the security and every update are still yours to do, and it adds a monthly bill of its own.

What no build gives you

The loading

Your years of records prepared and loaded by hand under a written scope, organized and made answerable before the service begins. A self-built machine starts blank and mostly stays that way.

The care

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

Someone accountable

Written support from the people who run the whole service — replies within one business day. The alternative is a forum, when someone answers.

A service 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 machine really does keep everything under your own roof, and ours does not — your assistant runs in our private cloud on Amazon Web Services. If nothing-leaves-the-house is your bar and the upkeep is a pleasure rather than a chore, build — sincerely. What the service buys is what no blank box gives you: the loading, the care, someone accountable in writing within one business day, and the strongest commercial models inside one flat fee. And where it runs is written out plainly — your own encrypted space, keys held in AWS KMS, model traffic over private networking rather than the public internet — so you can weigh the trade instead of taking it on trust. Where it runs →

What the one price covers

One service, one price. $9,995 the first year — everything included. $5,995 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. Your assistant is built for you and nobody else: your material sits in your own encrypted space, never pooled, never shared, never used to train anyone else’s model — and when the service ends, your space and everything in it is deleted, confirmed in writing. 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.

What each year contains, on one page: See what it costs.

Your own AI. Your own material. One assistant, yours alone.

$9,995 the first year — everything included. $5,995 each year after. The first year costs more because it contains the preparation — your archive prepared and loaded by hand under a written scope, and your assistant built on it — as well as the first year of the service; every year after is the service running.

Begin the first year — $9,995

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 the year begins on the date the letter names. Prefer to write to us first?