One membership instead of a stack of subscriptions — and nothing leaves the building

Most people paying seriously for AI today are paying several companies at once, forever — for tools that keep everything on someone else's servers and end with you owning nothing. This page does the honest math on the other way: one flat membership, everything included, the work done on a machine in your building, and the machine yours after a year.

What does the stack cost?

A power user paying for a chat app, a writing tool, and a couple of extras is often past $100 a month. A typical household with two or three tools lands around $40–60 a month. In cash, that stack is cheaper than a Home membership at $8,995 for the founding year — we will not pretend otherwise. But the stack includes no machine, no loading of your history, no care, and no ending: five years in, you have paid for tools you will never own, holding records that live on other people's servers. Five years into membership, you have owned the machine for four of them, founders renew at a locked $4,995 a year for the care, and every question your family ever asked it stayed in your house.

The honest arithmetic, plainly: this costs more than the stack — in year one and after. What the difference buys is a different category of thing: the machine itself, your archive loaded and answerable, all the care, one flat price for the whole household, and discretion as architecture rather than as a clause in someone else's terms of service. And only one of these paths ends with you owning the machine — and everything it has learned.

Why does almost every AI tool charge monthly, forever?

Because it runs on the company's computers. Every question you ask costs them something, so they bill you again each month — and the bill has no finish line. Stop paying and everything disappears: the history, the routines, the answers. You were never buying anything; you were renting a seat.

Running a firm or a practice?

The same shape of arithmetic exists for per-seat cloud tools — legal AI, scribes, the specialist apps — against one flat membership, and it lives where it belongs, on the professional pages: for law firms, for medical practices, or start at the practice door.

What is included that a subscription never gives you?

The hardware itself — a small, quiet machine that lives in your building. An assistant that arrives named, configured, and working on day one; you can change the name. Onboarding done before it ships, with your Life Graph loaded, so it starts out knowing your files instead of starting blank. Integrations set up for you. And full care: updates, health checks, and backups handled by us. If it breaks, we fix or replace it — that is our job, not yours. There is no start fee; the membership is the whole bill.

What happens after a year?

Do I give anything up next to the big AI apps?

Here is the honest concession: for the very hardest problems, the newest outside models still have an edge. That is exactly why your assistant can call on the services you already use, through your own accounts, when a job earns it — and nothing goes out until you approve it: once, for a while, or always. You hold the valve. The everyday work — your papers, your reminders, your drafts, your questions — is handled in the building, with no meter running.

Want the full arithmetic, every assumption shown? It is on the cost page. Want to see it next to the cloud apps directly? That comparison is here.

See the Founding Sixteen Begin the application