Use-case guide
Run open models on your own machine — private by default, no per-message cost, and yours to keep. These are the checked, genuinely free ways to do it.
Ollama
A free, open-source tool that runs open AI models locally on your own computer — private, offline-capable, and with no per-use fees. Download it at ollama.com for macOS, Windows, or Linux and pull a model with a single command.
Menlo Research
A free, open-source desktop app that runs AI models fully offline on your own computer — a private, self-hosted ChatGPT alternative that can also connect to cloud models, from jan.ai.
Hugging Face
The open hub for machine learning — hundreds of thousands of free, downloadable AI models and datasets, in-browser demos, and the libraries much of the field is built on. Free to browse and use at huggingface.co, with paid plans for teams and hosted compute.
Every tool here has a genuine free tier and was checked by hand — see how listings are checked, or browse the whole directory.