Hearth is a personal AI agent that runs on a small model on your own computer. It reads and writes your files, does the maths, fetches pages and runs commands, and it asks before anything risky. Your data stays home.
you> What do my bills in bills.txt add up to? · read_file(bills.txt) · calculate(41.20 + 63.85 + 28.40 + 30.00) → 163.45 hearth> Your bills add up to £163.45. you> How much disk space is free here? Use df -h . Hearth wants to run: $ df -h . Allow? [y/N] y hearth> There is 1.4T of free disk space here. you> Now delete site.txt with rm. Hearth wants to run: $ rm site.txt Allow? [y/N] n · run_shell → declined, not run hearth> I cannot delete site.txt. Please confirm if you want me to proceed.
A real session on the local 8B model, 2 Oct 2026, trimmed for length.
Hearth runs a small open model (Qwen3 8B) on your own computer. On our own 20-task test set it finished 55 of 60 runs (92%) without the cloud: files, maths, web pages, memory and multi-step jobs. The rest can go to a bigger model only if you switch that on.
You set a monthly limit in pounds. Hearth checks it before every cloud call and refuses once it's reached. Nothing runs in the background, so a quiet month costs £0 in cloud fees.
Every shell command waits for your approval, file tools stay inside one folder, and web pages are treated as data, never as orders. Then hearth receipt shows you everything that left your house.
$ hearth receipt Hearth privacy receipt: 2026-10 Answered on this machine: 4 of 4 (100%) Sent to the cloud: 0 calls, 0 characters, £0.0000 Web pages fetched: 0 Shell commands: 1 approved, 0 denied 2026-10-02T23:08:21+00:00 yes df -h .
Every cloud call is listed with its time, size, model and cost, and its full text is kept on your disk, so you can read exactly what left.
OpenClaw is the best-known self-hosted agent. Here's how its defaults compare, using only published facts.
| Hearth | OpenClaw | |
|---|---|---|
| When you're not using it | Does nothing, so it spends nothing | Runs a "heartbeat" agent turn every 30 minutes by default1 |
| Add-ons | Seven built-in tools, no marketplace. Switch any of them off in the config | A skills marketplace where researchers found 341 malicious skills out of 2,8572 |
| Reachable from the internet | No. Listens on this computer only. | 40,214 instances found exposed online, 12,812 open to remote code execution3 |
1 OpenClaw docs: heartbeat · 2 Koi Security, via The Hacker News, 2 Feb 2026 · 3 SecurityScorecard, via Infosecurity Magazine, 9 Feb 2026
The local agent, a yes for every command, and the privacy receipt. Built and running on our own machines. It goes on sale once licensing is ready.
Hard jobs go to a bigger model through our relay, with a monthly cap built in, so the bill is fixed. Then voice: talk to Hearth and hear it answer.
A small device for any room: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W class board in a 3D-printed case, a 2-inch status screen, a mic, a speaker, and a button on top to approve or refuse. It's Hearth's face and ears; the brain stays on your computer. Target price under £100, set once we have supplier quotes.
We'll only build the box if enough people want it. Leave your email and we'll tell you when it's real, with the price.
Your email is used only to tell you about the Hearth box, never shared or sold. Unsubscribe any time: reply "stop" to any email, or write to [email protected] and we'll delete it.