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.
flufluflufluffy 9 hours ago [-]
This might sound kinda crazy, but I define “self-hosted” as something that I host myself.
brainless 8 hours ago [-]
To me, "self-hosted" means, either I use a rented hardware or I use a purchased hardware.
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.
"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.
drillsteps5 4 hours 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.
rdiddly 3 hours ago [-]
You can correct it
idiotsecant 6 minutes ago [-]
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
singpolyma3 4 hours ago [-]
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
jauer 3 hours ago [-]
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.
foobarbecue 7 hours ago [-]
Yourself? In your brain?
paulddraper 3 hours ago [-]
No, on your hardware.
If someone else can fat finger a delete, it’s not self hosted.
pan69 31 minutes ago [-]
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?
hxii 2 hours ago [-]
So if someone could physically gain access to your server/computer and press "delete" –– would that mean your service is not self-hosted?
itsmeduncan 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jamienk 4 hours ago [-]
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.
_fat_santa 6 hours ago [-]
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.
0x4e 5 hours ago [-]
Can “on-prem” solve this debate?
You can self-host on-prem or in the cloud.
drillsteps5 4 hours ago [-]
This makes sense. You can self-host on-prem or host in the cloud. Easy and intuitive.
conorcleary 3 hours ago [-]
Can we sort out DSL as a group? ;)
bogdiyan 7 hours ago [-]
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.
j45 6 hours ago [-]
Self-hosting is when you install and run something for yourself.
Whether you use the cloud, or a vps, or a dedicated bare metal server, or your own equipment at home is all self hosting.
toomuchtodo 7 hours ago [-]
“Self contained”? Like a container, run on Cloudflare, run locally, run anywhere (if supported by the container and required underlying primitives).
bogdiyan 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tropicalhunter 7 hours ago [-]
I agree.
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.
Narretz 8 hours ago [-]
Where do you draw the line? Some SaaS acceptable? VPS? Bare metal? Or your own server in your own home?
loveparade 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sigbottle 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Kudos 2 hours ago [-]
I don't have a VPS, I have a mini server in my house. I run bunch of publicly available services on it.
pwython 7 hours ago [-]
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"?
ajnin 6 hours ago [-]
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.
paulddraper 2 hours ago [-]
If you run Plane on your hardware, then it is self-hosted.
nilamo 5 hours ago [-]
I think the line is obvious... If you can't unplug it, you're not self-hosting.
permalac 7 hours ago [-]
You should have the option to host it at home. Then you may choose to host in a vps. Must be vendor agnostic.
Barbing 6 hours ago [-]
Agreed, in my mind it’s where the developer can’t unilaterally change your installation.
speedgoose 5 hours ago [-]
I would personally draw the line a the data centres. If your infrastructure involves data centres, this is not self hosting. In my opinion.
vrganj 8 hours ago [-]
IMO physical hardware in your own material possession, so only the last of your examples.
(You can manage it, the resources, replace the software, etc.)
esafak 4 hours ago [-]
All he had to do was to title it properly: 'An AI agent hosted on Cloudflare's free tier'.
bdangubic 2 hours ago [-]
buy a few shares of NET - you are partial owner now - problem solved :)
nurettin 8 hours ago [-]
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.
malfist 7 hours ago [-]
To make an apple pie from scratch, one must first create the universe?
F7F7F7 5 hours ago [-]
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.
onemoresoop 7 hours ago [-]
I think op is thinking about local.
nurettin 5 hours ago [-]
So am I
catchnear4321 7 hours ago [-]
Is this an Elon reference?
coubri 4 hours ago [-]
honestly the fact that Cloudflare pays for infra instead of you is even more impressive ngl
threatofrain 4 hours ago [-]
As impressive as Facebook paying for your social media experience.
vlovich123 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jonplackett 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah completely agree. Jeez someone made something cool.
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 1 hours ago [-]
But it’s not self hosted like in self hosted.
Why add a false feature claim if the true features are cool enough?
blacklite 31 minutes ago [-]
Who said they like hacker culture in 2026?
croes 1 hours ago [-]
Here my program with feature A, ok without feature A, but you can add it with 20 min of work.
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
jambutters 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hung 8 hours ago [-]
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.
OsrsNeedsf2P 8 hours ago [-]
I got my bill reversed after having an AI agent pester them long enough
dominotw 3 hours ago [-]
was the ai agent running on their free tier
mattmaroon 6 hours ago [-]
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.
hung 5 hours ago [-]
Only if the support discord isn't actually for support and just for venting, which seems to be the case for Cloudflare's.
mattmaroon 3 hours ago [-]
Discord is a much better app for venting than support.
forsalebypwner 1 hours ago [-]
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.
dexterdog 3 hours ago [-]
You should put anything like this on a privacy.com card with a monthly limit.
ttul 5 hours ago [-]
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.
subscribed 58 minutes ago [-]
I've read yesterday how someone's DO racked $34k bill, someone's else's $17k.
They're pretty cool indeed, just pretty risky.
dxetech 2 hours ago [-]
While Durable Objects are a different story, data coupled with code brings up awful memories of MacOS FileMaker
1dom 9 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand the use-case or target audience for this. Selfhosted on cloudflare is a great oxymoron though.
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.
tomrod 6 hours ago [-]
"Self-managed" seems the better term.
drillsteps5 4 hours ago [-]
"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.
deanc 9 hours ago [-]
This is the first I’m hearing about Cloudflare’s worker AI product. I see they provide 10,000 neurons a day on the free tier. What on earth is that?
Looks like it's about 4M input tokens or 0.5M output tokens with their cheapest model `@cf/meta/llama-3.2-1b-instruct`
With `@cf/qwen/qwen3.8-27b` it's 240K input tokens and 34,000 output tokens
876433790 4 hours ago [-]
A fantasy currency like in shitty mobile games to obfuscate the actual amount of money spent.
StrLght 9 hours ago [-]
There's nothing self-hosted about relying on Cloudflare for _literally_ everything.
TheSkyHasEyes 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, but this is a free thing for some to play around with. Nothing literal, reliant or histrionic about it. :)
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
Call it "A free personal AI agent" if "free" is what you care about, self-hosted doesn't imply free nor vice-versa.
msdz 6 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Better yet, call it "free (as in beer)" to distinguish from the other meaning of free when talking about software :-)
ahel 4 hours ago [-]
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.
quietFalcon 8 hours ago [-]
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.
orbitaldesk 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
agegelife 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
scosman 5 hours ago [-]
Cloudflare worker AI is verrrrry slow for user interactive use cases. Fine for background jobs or evals.
ivanjermakov 4 hours ago [-]
> Your personal AI agent. Your own cloud.
Sorry, I don't own any cloud.
Nipola 6 hours ago [-]
In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has broadened
singpolyma3 4 hours ago [-]
Used to be broader. Some people wish to narrow it
benlower 5 hours ago [-]
all of the people disagreeing in this thread are evidence to the contrary
sanchezdev01 2 hours ago [-]
Neat. Gonna have to give this a try.
throwaway384638 5 hours ago [-]
FYI. Give Claude a cf key. Done. All work is now a prompt.
dortesedixson 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rociiu 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rociiu 10 hours ago [-]
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.
It's MIT licensed. Contributions and suggestions are welcome!
tln 2 minutes ago [-]
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?
Jolter 6 hours ago [-]
A suggestion: write the reader yourself next time you’re launching a product/project. It’s painful to always be reading this Claudeish prose.
richgroot 6 hours ago [-]
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.)
onionisafruit 9 hours ago [-]
This is a neat idea, but I wouldn’t say you aren’t relying on someone else's hosted service. Cloudflare isn’t a public utility quite yet.
9 hours ago [-]
muvlon 9 hours ago [-]
So instead of relying on someone's hosted service, this is relying on someone's 4 hosted services?
rvz 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
felixgallo 9 hours ago [-]
That’s great! Where do I download cloudflare?
TheSkyHasEyes 8 hours ago [-]
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.
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.
luka598 5 hours ago [-]
Rebuild it with swarm of agents in rust
piperswe 4 hours ago [-]
Except for Workers AI, I don't see any reason this wouldn't run on celld.
patcon 1 hours ago [-]
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
plusfour 9 hours ago [-]
from the internet
876433790 4 hours ago [-]
Can't. Clouflare is MitM-ing large parts of the internet and denying service with their shitty captachas.
6 hours ago [-]
pluc 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
AgentSearchHQ 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 20:37:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
If someone else can fat finger a delete, it’s not self hosted.
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.
Whether you use the cloud, or a vps, or a dedicated bare metal server, or your own equipment at home is all self hosting.
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.
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.
(You can manage it, the resources, replace the software, etc.)
It scales for the intended audience.
Self hosting doesn't mean you need to build the next AWS.
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?
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
They're pretty cool indeed, just pretty risky.
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.
With `@cf/qwen/qwen3.8-27b` it's 240K input tokens and 34,000 output tokens
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.
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!
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?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
agents package is very easy to disentangle from CloudFlare once you've sorted celld, which itself is just a single binary to run