[OS] Own your AI. Our biggest update yet: Osaurus is fully offline, open source, native Swift. No account, no subscription.
Hey r/macapps!
It's been a while.
A lot of you have been here since the start, so let me begin with the history, because the history is the point.
- We started as Dinoki, a 5MB desktop dinosaur. You showed up with 461 comments of honest feedback. Link
- Then we launched Osaurus here, and you carried it. Link
- Then Agents landed, and you told us what to build next. Link
Every one of those chapters happened because of this sub. Thank you for that.
We're five people now. Contributors send PRs, translations, and bug reports from all over the world. What began as one person and a dino is a small community building in the open, and that's because of you. We even ended up in TechCrunch, which still feels surreal for an open-source project that started as a desktop dinosaur. TechCrunch
Now we're back with our biggest update yet.
The biggest thing here isn't a feature. It's stability. We spent this cycle making local models actually work, and work well. If a local model let you down on an earlier build, this is the one to come back for. 24GB of RAM gets you started with smaller local models.
What Osaurus is: fully offline with local models, private, open source. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you choose. Native Swift for Apple Silicon, no Electron, no account, no subscription.
Problem: Most AI assistants run on someone else's server. Your files, memory, and context live in their cloud, behind a monthly subscription, and leave your machine every time you use them. Osaurus keeps all of it on your Mac. Local models run fully offline, and even when you pick a cloud model, your context and memory stay yours.
Comparison:
- vs Ollama and LM Studio: those run through Python bindings. Osaurus is pure Swift on Apple Silicon, no Python runtime, plus a full agent layer (memory, tools, sandbox, scheduling) they don't have.
- vs ChatGPT and Claude desktop apps: those are cloud-only and subscription-based, and your data leaves your device. Osaurus runs local models offline at no cost, and scrubs sensitive data on-device before anything reaches a cloud model.
Pricing: The app is free. MIT licensed, fully open source, no account or subscription, no API key needed to run local models offline at no cost. Cloud is optional and pay-as-you-go: bring your own provider key and pay them directly, or use Osaurus Cloud, our hosted path, where you load credits and we add a small fee on top-ups, matching what OpenRouter charges. We don't store your prompts or responses, only the usage metadata needed for billing.
Privacy is why a lot of you found us in the first place, so one thing worth mentioning. When you do reach for a cloud model, an on-device filter now catches names, emails, phone numbers, and secrets, and lets you scrub them before anything leaves the machine. It fails closed. If something would leak, the send is blocked.
And for the old fans who remember where this started: Dinoki is making a comeback, and it's coming back stronger than ever. More on that soon.
So here's what I'd love from you. Try it, and tell me the truth. If you gave Osaurus a shot before, give it another, and if it still falls short of your bar, say so, right here or in a DM, and we will be here to make it right.
And the bigger question, the one I keep coming back to: how do you envision your AI future? We think it should belong to you.
It's time to own your AI.
r/osaurus to follow along
Try it, break it, tell me what you need.