Talorys – A self-hosted personal AI agent on Cloudflare's free tier
github.com
github.com
I hope AI will push infra, including good-enough AI itself, dirt cheap, so that everyone has "good enough" software for themselves. Tailscale is a game changer in this regard but only the first step.
This is probably considerably less true in countries with a smaller ip to population ratio e.g. india.
the complaint is the communication, not the literal words. because the title conflicts with itself, it causes confusion.
for example, saying, "come join us. I'm hosting a dinner party. It's at this restaurant," would be similar.
It's perfectly reasonable and understandable to say you're hosting the party even if you don't own the physical location (see also: weddings)
If the software can be switched to a rented or purchased hardware (I do not want Cloudflare's offering) then it is "self-host-able" IMO.
I think there are open source Cloudflare alternative hosting software.
The first sentence states:
"Self-hosting is the practice of running a website or service on a home server instead of a web hosting service outside of the administrator's own control."
And then basically contradicts itself in the next paragraph:
"The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines."
In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has expanded over the years to include software that you're running on rented hardware in someone else's data center.
It scales for the intended audience.
Self hosting doesn't mean you need to build the next AWS.
I would describe it as externally hosted yet managed specifically because someone else is most likely, whether they admit to it or not, recording some sort of logs on my service and data and that is a choice that I do not own or, in some cases, have access to.
If someone else can fat finger a delete, it’s not self hosted.
Whether you use the cloud, or a vps, or a dedicated bare metal server, or your own equipment at home is all self hosting.
Yes it's not the same as hosting as your own hardware but I would argue that it accomplishes the same goals. The goal is to get other people out of your data. With a "service" the underlying company has every incentive to look at your data and use that to improve it's service, but when you host something yourself with a provider, it's in that providers best interest to never look at your data.
For me it all comes down to the goals of the people your are doing business with. With Cloudflare at least, their goal is to just upsell me on hosting equipment, they couldn't give a rats ass what I'm hosting on that hardware so long it's not illegal.
You can self-host on-prem or in the cloud.
(You can manage it, the resources, replace the software, etc.)
I self-host a few projects on forgejo in my local homelab but the build deployed to Cloudflare or Heroku. The CI is on my homelab too.
I still have primary control over those projects in Heroku and Cloudflare though.
It’s a weird complaint for people who supposedly like hacker culture.
It’s self hosted as in not by an ai provider. This is obvious.
Sure it’s set up to run on some infrastructure but just tweak it if you want to and stop complaining.
Why add a false feature claim if the true features are cool enough?
The self hosted part is about the ai provider.
Again. This is obvious.
So like, running bitwarden on a VPS counts as self-hosting even if the VPS isn't physically in your home.
And installing postgres or redis on the VPS counts as self-hosting as opposed to paying for a dedicated database.
So does installing your own web server. Running your own ACME client for certificates. Etc.
It doesn't require hardware you own, the idea of self-hosting includes software you control.
Are we now adding all possible features to the description just because they can be added by hand or LLM?
And since when is hacker culture about false advertising
I find it troubling that people with no prior knowledge begin "self-hosting" their chatbots like this and put their secrets and personal stuff there, which this repo encourages. From a security-view it's a nightmare to advertise this.
They're pretty cool indeed, just pretty risky.
Not a FX exchange level of traffic. There was no traffic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787042
Not sure what you're implying my position is, I said it's *risky* to use it (because there's no spending cap and a small mistake can result in life-changing bill for a hacker/solo dev).
https://x.com/jpschroeder/status/2086144942657712500
There was more.
It appears that even very large companies like Cloudflare may need to brush up on customer experience from time to time.
But I think changing aws fargate to google or azure alternative isn't a simple as that. It's already vendor locked because the business stake is to high to convert.
Calling it selfhosted but can only selfhost to Cloudflare unless doing heavy modification isn't selfhost.
Each part of this is very easy to implement, even if writing the code by hand. A chat interface, plus memories, plus semantic search, a little database, some embeddings, cron triggers. It's all trivial to implement... unless you want it to work, and more than that, if you want to know for sure that it works.
Because the harness is key, the prompting is key, the exact wording of the skills matters, the way the memories work, the embeddings used, all of these have influence over how well the system actually performs at being a personal assistant.
I've plugged together the dozen libraries necessary to do this sort of thing, and then it sorta works and sometimes doesn't. I realised that the whole problem is actually one of evaluation. If you don't have evals that say that it recalls memories with a certain performance, if you don't have evals that say that it actually completes tasks some percentage of the time, then you don't know if it actually works.
I've learnt not to bother investing my time in anything like this unless there's evidence that it actually works beyond "on my machine" from the devs.
Your worldview requires other enterprising people to try new things, write about them, find the rough edges, help to iterate and improve, and then surface their findings in such a way that it can meet the bar of "working".
If I operate forgejo on a hetzner instance I a self hosting my own forge despite it not being my hardware
Whoever the author of this repo is - they have made the personal agent runtime so that it can be self hosted. The runtime itself is the thing that you can self host.
With `@cf/qwen/qwen3.8-27b` it's 240K input tokens and 34,000 output tokens
Sometimes these "open source" services are a bit misleading as there is a coupling to the org providing them; I think the OP here just means there's nothing extra needed beyond whatever cloudflare commitment you already have.
It needs semantic recall though.
To test this, I added a memory entry for "I am a vegetarian" and then opened a chat asking "give me some dinner ideas". It gave me options for chicken and salmon, among other things.
I put together a proposal to add semantic functionality.
I built it without having a chatbot interface cause I don't see much of the point, like I didn't see the improvement in usefulness 5 years ago re "natural language" task creation a la todoist.
We manage the app and updates, while your backend and data live in your own Cloudflare account, so it's private. It's free, and we're currently building out more apps.
As is, I have already been running my own service (with no intent to open source) for years where I decide features, tools and UX that suits me. My UX is substantially different from these chat boxes. It is also multi-user by design. It still needs time investment but the tradeoff is worth for me. Over time, I expect this threshold to keep getting lower and increasing percentage of folks to cross it.
Generally, as that happens with the cost and time to build software trending lower, I think it will be interesting to watch how this dynamic evolves. For example, is it possible "personal OS" systems could emerge that solve the users' needs? I have created many smallish solutions for my needs recently, but they aren't unified in any way and I personally don't have a desire to be that [human] OS.
Sorry, I don't own any cloud.
The idea came from wanting a personal AI assistant that I could own and control, without paying a monthly subscription or relying on someone else's hosted service.
Talorys uses Cloudflare Workers, Workers AI, Durable Objects, and Pages to provide:
AI chat with persistent memory and conversation history Task, note, and project management Scheduled reminders and recurring automations A responsive web interface accessible from any device Password-protected access with no signup or external accounts One-command deployment: npx create-talorys@latest Everything runs in your Cloudflare account. Your data stays under your control, and there's no telemetry or third-party backend operated by me.
It's designed to work within Cloudflare's free-tier limits for personal use. You don't need to manage a VPS, database server, or Docker containers.
The biggest challenge was making deployment simple enough that someone could set up their own AI assistant without manually configuring Cloudflare services.
The project is still early, and I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially on the architecture, security, and what would make a self-hosted personal AI agent genuinely useful.
GitHub: https://github.com/rociiu/talorys
It's MIT licensed. Contributions and suggestions are welcome!
But you are hosting it on Cloudflare? There is always a cost when running on someone else's platform that advertises itself as 'free-tier' and it can change at any moment.
It is snark, but it is immune-response snark and not petty snark.
One shouldn't crush them for it, as it might be driven by naivety, but soft politeness alone doesn't steer us away from harmful ideas.
Social friction caused by feeling stupid for saying something is an important tool if wielded with responsibility and not just swung for ego.
(Besides, it is 100% obvious from context and from the many other comments, so bulldozer driving sea lions get out)
agents package is very easy to disentangle from CloudFlare once you've sorted celld, which itself is just a single binary to run
Giving it the ability to access webpages / do searches would be nice!
It seems like the free 10000 "neurons" would cover light daily usage, like maybe 20-30 minutes of back and forth. I spent 500 in a few minutes of chatting until I realized the tasks I had in mind aren't possible.
How often are you running out of gas, so to speak?