Last week I couldn't shake an idea: what if I had an AI that knew everything I know? Not ChatGPT — something on my hardware, holding my knowledge, answering to no one's API bill.
Yesterday I built it. Here's the honest breakdown.
NEXUS runs on a regular Windows laptop — aging i7, 16GB RAM, no GPU. It:
Ollama runs the models (Llama 3.2, Mistral 7B). Open WebUI is my private ChatGPT. Qdrant stores memory. n8n automates. SearXNG searches privately. PostgreSQL, Redis, and MinIO handle data.
Commercial equivalent: $300–500/month. My cost: electricity.
Your question becomes 768 numbers too, and the database finds memories with similar meaning — not matching keywords. I asked "how do I get clients cheaper" and it found my notes on "reducing customer acquisition cost." Different words. Same meaning. That's the magic.
The only future cost is a cloud GPU server (~$65/mo) when I outgrow the laptop — and the plan is for the system to pay for that itself.
By evening, NEXUS ran its first autonomous research mission: it searched the web, read five industry reports, cross-referenced its own memory, and delivered a cited market analysis to my phone — while I made coffee.
Next: a Writing Agent that drafts in my voice, and a Monitor Agent that hunts opportunities in the feeds it's already collecting.
An intelligence that doesn't just remember — it acts.
I'm documenting the whole build in public — every command, every dollar, every failure.
Ask me anything about the setup in the comments.
Stack: Ollama · Open WebUI · Qdrant · PostgreSQL · Neo4j · n8n · SearXNG · Redis · MinIO · Docker — all open source.