I built an AI that can't raise its price on you
Here's a bet I'm willing to put my name on: the AI you use today will cost more tomorrow. Not because anyone's greedy — because the price you're paying right now isn't the real one. The big AI companies are in a land-grab, subsidizing usage with investor money to win you before the music stops. Cheap subscriptions, generous limits, free tiers. It's wonderful. It's also temporary.
So I built the opposite. It's called Hearth — a free, private AI that runs entirely on your own computer. And the whole point is the part in the title: its price can't move.
Try Hearth free → hearth.kevinchamplin.com
Why a local AI can't raise its price on you
Every cloud AI has a meter running somewhere. Each message you send costs the company money to answer, so eventually that cost finds its way to you — as a subscription, a usage cap, or a "Pro" tier that quietly becomes mandatory. That's not a conspiracy; it's just physics plus a balance sheet.
Hearth has no meter, because there's no server doing the thinking. The model runs on the device in front of you. You download it once (about a gigabyte), and after that it runs in your browser — or as a desktop app — using your own computer's graphics chip. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. It even keeps working with the wifi switched off.
When the AI lives on hardware you already own, the marginal cost of using it is zero. So it's free today, and it's free in ten years. No one can reprice what they aren't hosting.
What I shipped these last couple weeks
Building in public means showing the work, so here's what actually went in:
- A native desktop app. The browser version is the zero-install way in, but a browser tab can only hold so much. So Hearth now has a desktop edition that runs bigger, smarter models natively on your machine's GPU — the same warm app, more horsepower. Getting a bundled inference engine to launch under macOS's hardened runtime, signed and notarized, was a genuinely fiddly day. Worth it.
- A blog that writes itself. I gave Hearth's site a content engine that publishes a fresh, on-brand post every morning — picking from a topic backlog, writing it, and updating the sitemap on its own. Compounding SEO without me babysitting it.
- A real internal-linking + schema pass across every page, so search engines and AI assistants can actually understand and cite it. (If you want the unglamorous version: a stale service worker was poisoning the model cache and causing ~97% of downloads to fail in a way a hard-refresh couldn't fix. Local-first AI is mostly caching problems wearing a trench coat.)
The honest part
A model that runs on your laptop is not going to out-muscle ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude on a giant, cutting-edge task — and I say so right on the site. Those cloud tools are brilliant and remain the right call for heavy lifting. Hearth is the everyday AI: recipes, rewriting an email, explaining something, thinking out loud. The difference is it's free, it's private by design, and it's yours. Here's the full, fair comparison.
It's also a solo passion project, and the full source is public (fair-source — readable and open to contributions, just not for cloning into a competing product). I'm not selling anything; I just think some of AI's future belongs on the machine in front of you, not only in someone else's data center.
Why now
Because the cheapest time to own your AI is before the meter starts. I wrote out the longer version of this argument here, but the short version is the title of this post.
If you want to try it, it takes about five seconds — no account, no install: open Hearth and start talking. Then turn your wifi off and watch it keep going. That part still makes me smile.
🔥 Try Hearth: hearth.kevinchamplin.com — free, private, and runs on your own computer. Open it in your browser → (no account, no install). See how it compares to ChatGPT or read the Hearth blog.
— Kevin