Lumo by Proton is private and free, however, it's not very good (at least on free tier).
Duck.ai claims to be private, but you can never trust an American company on that.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Privacy
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You should not trust any company with your privacy regardless of where they're located. Proton is logging what you're doing just as much as anyone else.
Nope, that’s why independent audits exist. On a random day, technicians from other organizations show up and check how the data is being handled, and Proton has passed every audit.
The reason you can’t trust American companies on that is because of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the National Security Letter. Government agencies can force companies to hand over data or create backdoors without court orders, and the companies aren’t allowed to tell their clients about it.
The audits mean nothing when the Swiss government can compel Proton to do whatever they want, as they've done before.
The only difference between what you're describing and what Proton did is that Proton were obligated to notify the user.
"Swiss law prohibits the country’s courts from compelling a VPN service to log IP addresses"
Seems like they breached only IPs that accessed emails (I haven't read their email terms before, but the VPN says "strict no-logs policy" - which is audited), but because of the zero-knowledge encryption they can't access email content.
ps: Another difference is that the government had to demonstrate on court there were basis to believe certain emails were linked to criminal activity... not that I don't believe it's bullshit, but in the USA they can require any data for any reason without demonstrating probable cause and you can't even mention it's happening.
"If something is free, you are the product"
If you're not providing your own compute power or your money (and you're not safe even if you pay most providers), expect the payment to come from your personal information or conversation contents being harvested. I'm not sure what magical service you're expecting that doesn't involve self-hosting for truly private conversations - you're just accessing someone else's machine if you're not hosting it yourself, and you're at their mercy.
What's "the privilege of running a local model"? If it's on a computer, it's not much of a privilege, gpt4all can get up and running in a minute. For mobile phones RAM is more of an issue.
I do not have a good enough internet connection to download local modals (Very unstable and slow). Downloading even an OS ISO file is not possible for me and i download them via friends. I don't think anyone would accept my request to download a 10GB+ file
Paid commercial LLM providers already profit off of inputs more than outputs, so I wouldn't trust any free cloud offering to be private. If you really want free and private, self-hosted is the only way to go
OpenRouter has some decently powerful free-to-use models, but I'm afraid as far as LLMs go 'free', 'good', and 'private' are going to be pretty mutually exclusive if you can't run one locally.
Seems like a cool product. I will check it out
I use Jan. It's really good. A minimal install needs around 10GB of space and you can use it offline. The 'jan nano' model works faster than I can read in most cases.
The Qwen models that you can run with llama.cpp (Jan's main backend) are quite brilliant for their size
There are a few AI models that are in this category, and I really liked Jan when I tested it out.
Cool, which ones do you recommend? Yeah, I found it really straightforward and pleasant to get started.
- LocalAI
- Ollama
Isn't duck.ai private? At least they say that...
nano-gpt.com
Bruv it looks like it was made by a 10 year old 😭
No.
The hardware needed to host even just a full size gpt3 costs tens of thousands of dollars, requires high current or high voltage circuits not usually accessible in residential homes and will actually use multiple thousands of watts of power.
If someone is giving access to such an expensive, power hungry industrial system for free they’re either doing it to learn from the inputs (not private) or don’t have a commercially viable system (not good).
Venice.ai is an uncensored model which is free and needs no account. Not sure if it's truly private though.
z.ai is kind of good, but i dont think it is private