A team in San Francisco killed Perplexity's $20/month subscription.
It's called Vane. You get AI-powered search with cited sources, follow-up questions, image and video search, and focus modes for academic papers, Reddit, YouTube, and Wolfram Alpha, running entirely on your own machine.
Here's how it works.
Vane is an open-source clone of Perplexity built on top of SearxNG which is a meta-search engine that pulls results from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave and 70+ other sources without tracking the user. You plug in any LLM you want including OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq or local models through Ollama and it answers your questions with real citations pulled from the live web in real time.
The entire stack can run 100% locally with Llama 3 and SearxNG on your own hardware which means zero API calls going out and zero data ever leaving your machine.
→ No $20/month Pro subscription holding the good models hostage
→ No query limits cutting you off mid-research
→ No tracking and no profile being built from your searches
→ Local mode with Ollama supporting Llama, Mistral, Qwen and anything else you throw at it
→ Focus modes that narrow the search to Academic papers, YouTube, Reddit, Wolfram Alpha or Writing
→ Image and video search built directly into the interface
→ Copilot mode that breaks one question into multi-step research and synthesizes the findings
Perplexity charges $20 a month for Pro and trains its ranking algorithm on every query you send them. Their entire business model assumes you would never spend an evening with a Docker compose file and a local LLM.
Vane runs in one container and SearxNG runs in another and the whole thing points at a Llama 3 model running on your laptop with no internet account involved anywhere in the chain.
MIT License. 100% Opensource
https://github.com/ItzCrazyKns/Vane
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