Hi HN! I built Talorys, an open-source personal AI agent that runs entirely in your own Cloudflare account.
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.
> without paying a monthly subscription or relying on someone else's hosted service.
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.
I'm torn in situations like these, because OP is clearly furthering societal trends that are objectively harmful by watering down terminology like this.
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.
Then explain what the problem is, in clear language. Otherwise the person reading your response is going to take away only the message that you're a bit of an arse, and have no actual point to make.
And I've swapped Workers AI out of plenty of the example apps in the CloudFlare/agents repo on GitHub. I've gotten it working against a local whisperfile binary in like 5 minutes.
agents package is very easy to disentangle from CloudFlare once you've sorted celld, which itself is just a single binary to run
This is a neat implementation, regardless of the argument over how it is hosted! There are a number of other systems along the same general lines, but for me the sticking point is that there is no good implementation equivalent to the Alexa devices scattered around my home (and RV!) that allow me to interact via speech. I'm working on one of those now in my copious spare time. (Yes, there are a bunch of rPi projects. Their rates of errors are unacceptably high.)
This was very easy to set up and play around with.
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?
I think it's a pretty clear line. Self hosted means you can run it locally in your home, using a saas platform or vps is just a convenience, not a requirement.
What about FOSS SaaS alternatives that are meant for team collab? Like Plane (Jira replacement). Does that have to be ran locally at home for it to be considered "self hosted"?
Self hosted means you host it yourself. I.e. you run the software. Running on your own home machine is definitely self-hosted. Hosting it on a VPS in some datacenter still is. Running it in a cloud platform somewhere is stretching it but I'd say that sill is. SaaS definitely is not self hosting even if the software is open source. The important part is that you're the one in control of the software.
I think a VPS is acceptable because otherwise you just can't let the broader internet talk to you, then. The internet's structured that way.
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.
"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.
I think the opposite. 20 years ago self hosting almost always meant "in a data centre" but as home internet got better people started to think "or maybe in my basement" and now it's swung so far that a few think if it's not in your basement it's not self hosting
Self hosting wasn’t popular nomenclature back then, but it was common for people to host web and mail on at home on DSL or even dial-up (ISDN or even analog if you were bold) 20-30 years ago.
I only use Wikipedia occasionally but this is seriously the worst article I've ever seen. It switches the definition between "running on my own hardware" and "running it in the cloud" multiple times. It's been pointed out in a discussion about the article several months ago but nobody bothered to correct it.
Which is what has been done in pieces and argued about 10000 times to make this abomination. I guarantee there is someone watching this article 24/7 that will revert it the moment you update it
No, crazy would be owning the router and cables/satellites as well as producing your own power and having a manufacturing plant for hardware capable of running the software.
People have been running public websites off of the back of their ISPs since the 90s. I know a few today that are nothing but a Raspberry PI running Pocketbase.
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.
Where is your own hardware located? A data center? Or maybe your place of residence? What if that location is compromised? Does that mean that physical ownership of the hardware is also not self hosted?
It is confusing, I agree. IMO we should have "self-running" and "self-hosting". Self-running if I provide the hardware, self-hosting if I manage it. Or swap the term, still not sure but there is a difference between you are the one maintaining it and where does it run.
I gave it a second thought and I think terms should be "self-managed" - you manage it either locally or in cloud and "self-hosted" you host it locally. Idk "self-contained" doesn't click with me, to be fair.
I would define hosting in the cloud as "self-hosting" because you perform the act of hosting that thing and thus have full control over it.
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.
I think the reality is the goal posts are shifting on owning your own data, and apps. The idea that self-hosted is not on your _own_ hardware is crazy to me.
Is it a "goal post" shift or an insidious confusion? Clouds can be regulated, guard-railed, censored, spied on. Since your local computer is also just "cloud," it too can be regulated. This makes the mental-model change: what used to be "my personal thing" now becomes "a thing in the common network". That's different; it represents different values.
I'm not sure I understand why? If you hosted plex on a vps, you'd still call it self-hosted. I don't see why using (a) fargate or (b) lambda or (c) cf workers changes the calculus here?
Careful with Cloudflare's "free" AI tier if you use paid workers. I was never able to get an answer on why I was billed for their confusing neuron usage for stuff that should have been covered under their usage limits. Their customer support just ignored my ticket. Apparently it's a known issue that they don't give a shit based on discussions in their support Discord.
Not disagreeing because I don’t know anything about this particular situation, but I think if you look at any company’s support discord, you will find that they don’t give a shit because of the sample bias. People whose problems they solved. Don’t end up there.
yeah their billing system truly sucks. One month I was charged exorbitantly for Workers Container usage. There was absolutely zero way to monitor or track your usage until the invoice arrived.
Did a side project on Workers and the self host test for me was whether I could run it off Cloudflare at all. Durable Objects and KV bindings meant no, so it was really just deploy it yourself.
For those questioning (rightly) the "self-hosted" description, I suspect its a poorly-worded attempt to clarify there is no third-party requirement (eg. the repo is not cloudflare-owned) beyond your own cloudflare account.
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.
"Hosted" is the term that describes an application running on someone else's hardware. As opposed to "self-hosted" which describes an application running on my own hardware. There's no need to invent new terms, just use the existing ones properly and this will prevent any confusion.
Durable Objects are the coolest thing I have seen in a while. Code and its data locked away together, frozen when not in use, but ready to go in milliseconds when a request comes in. They are so damn useful.
For all the people complaining this isn’t self hosted, it’s open source - it’s a relatively minor tweak to replace the AI calls to point to a local model server. Everything else runs locally via wrangler. It’s less than 20 minutes of work by hand, less than a minute to ask AI to do this.
It’s a weird complaint for people who supposedly like hacker culture.
Eh, it's the phrasing that's off-putting. Things that can be self hosted usually emphasize that first and top most, with a paid option being mentioned 2nd.
This is like saying you're self-hosting a game server because it's not hosted on the developers' server, but on the server of some other random third party you're paying to run it. No, self-hosting means you run it on hardware you own. Cloudflare is no stranger to redefining completely established terms for marketing reasons (see 'Cloudflare OS'), how about we stop buying it every time?
Claude suggested the same approach for something very similar I asked and ended up deploying and using.
Quite useful and snappy architecture (never used workers or durable objects).
Definitely not self-hosted but whatever, I think you got the msg from all other comments.
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.
This is great. If this was available a few years ago, I would have looked at this and similar projects to see if I should base my personal use service on. Why send your sometimes relatively private info elsewhere to be profiled? Why not have software that solves for your needs?
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.
[OP] rociiu | 11 hours ago
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!
onionisafruit | 10 hours ago
muvlon | 10 hours ago
rvz | 10 hours ago
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.
felixgallo | 10 hours ago
plusfour | 10 hours ago
876433790 | 5 hours ago
TheSkyHasEyes | 9 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
hypfer | 9 hours ago
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.
AndrewDucker | an hour ago
luka598 | 7 hours ago
piperswe | 5 hours ago
patcon | 3 hours ago
agents package is very easy to disentangle from CloudFlare once you've sorted celld, which itself is just a single binary to run
Jolter | 8 hours ago
richgroot | 7 hours ago
tln | an hour ago
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?
deanc | 10 hours ago
martheen | 10 hours ago
pcthrowaway | 10 hours ago
With `@cf/qwen/qwen3.8-27b` it's 240K input tokens and 34,000 output tokens
876433790 | 5 hours ago
flufluflufluffy | 10 hours ago
Narretz | 10 hours ago
vrganj | 10 hours ago
loveparade | 10 hours ago
pwython | 8 hours ago
ajnin | 7 hours ago
paulddraper | 4 hours ago
sigbottle | 6 hours ago
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.
Kudos | 4 hours ago
croes | 8 hours ago
permalac | 8 hours ago
Barbing | 7 hours ago
nilamo | 6 hours ago
speedgoose | 6 hours ago
brainless | 9 hours ago
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.
croes | 8 hours ago
jmknoll | 8 hours ago
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.
singpolyma3 | 6 hours ago
jauer | 4 hours ago
drillsteps5 | 5 hours ago
rdiddly | 5 hours ago
idiotsecant | an hour ago
senectus1 | 7 hours ago
debarshri | 3 hours ago
nurettin | 9 hours ago
onemoresoop | 9 hours ago
nurettin | 7 hours ago
catchnear4321 | 9 hours ago
malfist | 9 hours ago
F7F7F7 | 6 hours ago
It scales for the intended audience.
Self hosting doesn't mean you need to build the next AWS.
tropicalhunter | 9 hours ago
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.
foobarbecue | 9 hours ago
paulddraper | 4 hours ago
If someone else can fat finger a delete, it’s not self hosted.
hxii | 3 hours ago
pan69 | 2 hours ago
bogdiyan | 8 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 8 hours ago
bogdiyan | 7 hours ago
j45 | 7 hours ago
Whether you use the cloud, or a vps, or a dedicated bare metal server, or your own equipment at home is all self hosting.
_fat_santa | 7 hours ago
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.
0x4e | 6 hours ago
You can self-host on-prem or in the cloud.
drillsteps5 | 5 hours ago
conorcleary | 4 hours ago
itsmeduncan | 6 hours ago
jamienk | 5 hours ago
esafak | 6 hours ago
coubri | 6 hours ago
threatofrain | 5 hours ago
paulddraper | 4 hours ago
(You can manage it, the resources, replace the software, etc.)
bdangubic | 3 hours ago
ssss11 | 40 minutes ago
StrLght | 10 hours ago
TheSkyHasEyes | 10 hours ago
embedding-shape | 9 hours ago
msdz | 8 hours ago
1dom | 10 hours ago
bharatsuthar | 8 hours ago
smw | an hour ago
hung | 10 hours ago
OsrsNeedsf2P | 9 hours ago
dominotw | 4 hours ago
mattmaroon | 8 hours ago
hung | 6 hours ago
mattmaroon | 4 hours ago
dexterdog | 4 hours ago
forsalebypwner | 3 hours ago
quietFalcon | 9 hours ago
Nipola | 8 hours ago
benlower | 6 hours ago
singpolyma3 | 6 hours ago
mellosouls | 8 hours ago
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.
tomrod | 8 hours ago
drillsteps5 | 5 hours ago
scosman | 7 hours ago
ttul | 7 hours ago
dxetech | 3 hours ago
subscribed | 2 hours ago
They're pretty cool indeed, just pretty risky.
throwaway384638 | 6 hours ago
vlovich123 | 6 hours ago
It’s a weird complaint for people who supposedly like hacker culture.
jambutters | 5 hours ago
jonplackett | 4 hours ago
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.
croes | 3 hours ago
Why add a false feature claim if the true features are cool enough?
tavavex | an hour ago
croes | 3 hours ago
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
blacklite | 2 hours ago
vlovich123 | 40 minutes ago
ivanjermakov | 6 hours ago
Sorry, I don't own any cloud.
ahel | 5 hours ago
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.
sanchezdev01 | 4 hours ago
geoffbp | 3 hours ago
thought-gap | 2 hours ago
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.
varispeed | an hour ago