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Vaenyx – A personal AI app for family

Vaenyx, a self-hosted, local-first personal AI agent for households, is now available as a pre-1.0 release, with data stored in a local SQLite database and support for cloud or local model backends. The app, which runs on Windows via an installer or zip, offers chat, projects, memory, pluggable backends (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or local endpoints), Methods & Routines, a Community Library, scheduled tasks, and backup/restore, all accessible at http://localhost:3000.

read3 min views1 publishedSep 8, 2026
Vaenyx – A personal AI app for family
Image: Michielbdejong (auto-discovered)

A self-hosted, local-first personal AI agent for your household. Vaenyx runs on your own machine: your chats, memory, projects, tasks and files stay in a local SQLite database under your control, and you choose which AI model backend it talks to — a cloud provider under your own account, or a local model on your own hardware.

Status: pre-1.0, under active development. Interfaces and data formats may still change between versions.

The installer (recommended). Download vaenyx-setup.exe from the latest release and run it. If Windows shows a blue "Windows protected your PC" box, click More info, then Run anyway — the download is new and not yet signed; nothing is wrong. The wizard asks for a language and an install folder (default C:\Vaenyx), sets everything up, starts Vaenyx, and leaves a Vaenyx icon on the desktop. Uninstall from Windows Apps & features; it asks whether to keep your data, and keeping it is the default.

The zip (no installer). Download vaenyx-setup.zip instead, unzip it anywhere sensible (not a cloud-synced folder), read Read-Me-First.txt, and double-click Vaenyx-Setup.cmd — the same setup, without a wizard.

Either way Vaenyx ends up at http://localhost:3000 in your browser, and the app keeps itself up to date from inside Settings.

Cloning this repository with git also works (see below) and is the right path for development — but note that a git checkout deliberately does not self-update from releases; it updates with git pull. The release zip is the install every guide and the website assume.

  • Chat + projects + memory — a personal assistant that keeps its context on your machine, organised into projects with reviewable memory.
  • Pluggable model backends — OpenAI (Codex CLI or API key), Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible local endpoint (Ollama, LM Studio); pick a default and switch per chat.
  • Methods & Routines — declarative building blocks (Methods) composed into ready-to-use products (Routines) that run locally: feed one something, it runs its steps and keeps a log.
  • Community Library — browse and install Methods/Routines shared by the community; publish your own under a display name you choose. Community content is declarative-only: installing it never installs or runs code.
  • Scheduled tasks — recurring runs with history, retry and cancel.
  • Backup & restore — one-click snapshots of your database and library, stored locally.

Your instance's data lives in userdata/ on your machine and is never committed or uploaded by Vaenyx. Chats you send to a cloud model provider do reach that provider under its own terms — that routing is your choice, per chat. Using the Community Library needs no account; publishing uses a Google or GitHub sign-in, with a self-chosen public display name. The formal terms, privacy policy and contributor terms live in docs/legal/ and inside the app under Settings → Legal.

Requirements: Node.js ≥ 24, npm ≥ 11.

  1. Double-click Vaenyx-Start.cmd .
  2. Open http://localhost:3000 if the browser does not open automatically.
  3. Stop from Settings → Stop Vaenyx (or Vaenyx-Stop.cmd ).

Vaenyx-Backup.cmd snapshots your data; Vaenyx-Update.cmd updates from the configured Git remote. See the Windows guide and the migration guide.

The server binds to 127.0.0.1 only. For phone access use an authenticated tunnel (e.g. Tailscale) — never expose the port directly to the internet.

npm ci
npm run dev      # Fastify server + Vite web dev servers
npm run check    # lint, typecheck, tests, build

Stack: React/Vite web app · Fastify server · shared TypeBox contracts · SQLite. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.

Roles:

Privacy policy: Vaenyx runs on your own machine. It does not transfer any information to other networked systems unless specifically requested by the user or the person installing or operating it — see Privacy Policy for the full statement, including the third-party AI providers you may choose to connect.

Code: MIT. Third-party dependencies: THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md (regenerated every release). The "Vaenyx" name and brand assets are not MIT-licensed — see TRADEMARKS.md and the Trademark Policy; forks must rebrand. Community-published content is CC BY 4.0 under the Contributor Agreement.

Security reports: SECURITY.md.

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