I'm tired.
Tired of the status quo. 18+ months ago I started on a journey out of sheer frustration for something that simply didn't exist. At first, I was blown away by AI. The possibilities were endless. Doors were suddenly open to me that were previously only a dream. After a while I started to see the problems like everyone else.
I will preface this by saying I have two kids, a full time job, and started building something on the side not because I wanted to, but because I had to. No one else was doing the thing that I thought was obvious. At least not in the way I personally wanted. The price of doing these things separately required a lot of research and work. I got there, but by then my mind was made up. One platform, all purposes, honest, not controlled by a few companies that want your money and data on their terms.
Let one thing be clear. This might be obvious, but you don't need a PhD-level intelligence to write an email. To summarize a document you already own. To organize your notes, search your own files, write a first draft. These are everyday tasks we do a thousand times a day. Somewhere along the way the industry decided you did. They said only the most powerful AI ever built was good enough for your daily workflows. Then they built a subscription around that idea.
Now, local models are not GPT-5.5 or Claude Mythos [or insert your super mega ultra model of the month here]. Open source hasn't beaten the frontier (yet). But they're doing things today that would have required frontier models a year ago. The gap is closing fast. Qwen 3.5/3.6 and Gemma 4 are proof of that.
Here's what I've actually built: Of course we have normal chat and vibe coding (everyone has this). We have projects that work like Claude, only local. I built a Code Workshop for developers who want a local alternative to Cursor (yes, I am aware of OpenCode and do love it too) and tools like Aider and Cline. I created Notebook Studio for researchers: upload your documents, ask questions, get answers with citations. Like NotebookLM, but private. On your machine. Nobody else's. And ABZI Web for when you want answers from the web the way Perplexity gives them. Organized, sourced, not a list of links to click through. The reading and refining happens on your machine — a small local agent strips the junk from the results and hands your model just the facts. The only thing that ever leaves your machine is the search query itself. No account, no profile, no history stored anywhere but locally.
One platform. Everything in one place. Completely local, secure, and environmentally conscious.
I am not doing this because I claim it's better than every tool out there. I am doing this because you shouldn't need five different subscriptions and five different logins to do your best work. Nor should you need to be a developer or work in Software/IT to understand how to get it to work on a machine in the first place.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of paying $20 a month or more for Claude. Another $20 for Cursor. $10 for Midjourney. Subscriptions stacked on subscriptions, each one promising to make my life easier, while quietly making my wallet lighter and tightening their limits, so I get less and less over time.
More recently, I love the quiet emails that arrive on a Tuesday. "We're updating our policies and pricing to better reflect the value we provide." What they mean is: we have you now. You built your workflow around us.
And if you want real usage, it's $100 to $200 a month now!?
$20 was originally just something that "sounded good." The head of ChatGPT admitted it was picked to turn away casual users. Not based on value. Not based on cost. Just: what price makes people think twice?
Everyone else followed. Claude. Gemini. Copilot. All $20.
It certainly hasn't gotten better.
And the cost of these superpowers besides money? Every conversation you have, every document you write, every idea you share — it's going somewhere. Training their models. Product improvement. You clicked agree. Remember?
OpenAI started as a non-profit with one goal: benefit humanity. That was the mission. That was the promise. They changed that mission statement six times in nine years. In 2025 they removed the word "safely" entirely.
You can decide what that means.
These platforms are not designed to care about you or your interests. You are not the mission. You are the revenue.
But that's just one side of it. Here's what doesn't get talked about enough: Data centers consumed more electricity last year than all but 10 countries on Earth. Communities are fighting proposed data centers to protect their water supply. 208 million tons of CO₂ last year — comparable to Argentina's entire national output. Every query to a cloud AI is a small piece of that. ABZI tracks what you save by running locally, right there on your dashboard, every session. Not to make you feel better. Just to make it visible.
I don't answer to a board. I'm not chasing a billion dollar valuation. I'm not trying to extract maximum value from you before the next funding round. I have bills like everyone else. I'm just trying to offer a different path.
Don't believe me? Good. Try it. It's free. Not a trial. Not a preview. The core of what ABZI is — free. No expiration date.
As I add more I'm not moving the foundation. Pro is there for people who want to go deeper. But I'm not building a wall between you and something useful just to upsell you.
My goal is never to give you "just enough" to then make you pay.
It's time to come home.
— Chris, Founder of ABZI