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AI · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to BitTorrent-style LLMs come to Kalavai

Today we are thrilled to announce the release of a public Kalavai pool dedicated to host Petals workers. This is part of our wider effort to offer easy access to compute to AI developers. Do you find this useful? What other tooling would you like to see running on crowdsourced hardware?

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. BitTorrent-style LLMs come to Kalavai launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Kalavai▲102

    The first platform to crowdsource AI computation

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I have a favour to ask. I’ve been working for a while on Kalavai, a project to make distributed AI easy. There are brilliant tools out there to help AI hobbyists and devs on the software layer (shout out to vLLM and llamacpp amongst many others!) but it’s a jungle out there when it comes to procuring and managing the necessary hardware resources and orchestrating them. This has always led me to compromise on the size of the models I end up using (quantized versions, smaller models) to save cost or to play within the limits of my rig. Today I am happy to share the first public version of our…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Perssua▲61

    Real-time guidance from any LLM (including local ones)

    Nov 2025 · perssua.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…

    2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hi HN, I've been working with LLMs in production for a while both as a solo dev building apps for clients and working at an AI startup. The one thing that always was a pain was to pay OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic a few dollars a month just for me to say "test" or have a CI runner validate some UI code. So I built this server called ChunkBack, that mocks the popular llm provider's functionality but allows you to type in a deterministic language: `SAY "cheese"` or `TOOLCALL "tool_name" {} "tool response"` I've had to work in some test environments and give good results for experimenting…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9SH

    Hello everyone, I am the creator of Stable Horde, a free, open sourced, crowdsourced, distributed cluster of Stable Diffusion (AKA AI image generation) workers. This service is provided for free and without any small print. The only thing one needs to be aware of is that your prompt goes to someone else's computer to be created and then sent back with all the caveats that entails. The main difference from all the other Stable Diffusion webuis and services are: * This service is free for everyone, without credits. While we do have a kudos system, this is only used for priority and you can…

    2022 · stablehorde.net · its alternatives →

  10. 10MF

    I know everyone is a bit burned out on blockchain and cryptocurrency related stuff around these parts, but I've been working on as a side project for the last few months and thought you guys might be interested: https://cryptoempire.io/ It's still a bit buggy and incomplete (the mobile ux needs a lot of work, the leaderboard isn't functional yet, etc.), but I've reached a point where I'm not totally ashamed of sharing it :) Any feedback would be most welcome!

    2018 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi there, I've created this side project to make it easier to find interesting repositories using AI. There's still a lot of work to be done to improve it, so any suggestions for enhancements would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

    2024 · awesome-repositories.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hey HN, Like many of you, I'm tired of public AI leaderboards that mostly recycle the same saturated/overfitted benchmarks (MMLU, HumanEval, etc.) and often miss fast/cheap variants or real daily pain points. A couple days ago I launched AIBenchy — a small, opinionated leaderboard running my own custom tests focused on end-user/dev scenarios that actually trip up models today. Current tests cover categories like: - Anti-AI Tricks (classic gotchas like "count the Rs in strawberry", logic traps) - Instruction following & consistency - Data parsing/extraction -…

    Jun 2026 · aibenchy.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13IM

    Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!

    2024 · saas-quick.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!

    2025 · caniusellm.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Managed AI workspace

    Jun 2026 · nebuladeck.dev · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Been working on data sovereignty recently and started this list. Hope you can contribute too.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    I wanted to build an inference provider for proprietary AI models, but I did not have a huge GPU farm. I started experimenting with Serverless AI inference, but found out that coldstarts were huge. I went deep into the research and put together an engine that loads large models from SSD to VRAM up to ten times faster than alternatives. It works with vLLM, and transformers, and more coming soon. With this project you can hot-swap entire large models (32B) on demand. Its great for: Serverless AI Inference Robotics On Prem deployments Local Agents And Its open source. Let me know if anyone…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19IB

    I had 14,000 photos sitting on a drive and wanted an excuse to play with local vision models and Elixir/Phoenix. I originally tried to get LLaVA to tell me if a photo was 'good' or matched my style, but quickly learned that LLMs have terrible taste. I ended up demoting the LLM to just extract metadata, and built a custom CLIP/Ridge Regression pipeline to actually learn my preferences based on how I rate things. The stack is Phoenix/Oban on the orchestrator side, and Python/FastAPI/Instructor for the AI workers. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture,…

    Apr 2026 · qwelian.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

    2024 · twitter.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hello all, a couple of moons ago I ported karpathy's llama2.c code to run inference on the TinyStories 260K & 15M checkpoints on the on the PS Vita with the ability to download/delete the models on device. Runs showed that the 260K model ran at ~120 tok/s and at 15M ran at 1.8 tok/s, which probably could be a bit higher if it weren't a single threaded application. Had fun working on it as a weekend project, check it out for yourselves: https://github.com/callbacked/psvita-llm

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22NW

    Like in the movies when they show a current newspaper, but easier and safer. I use as seed the last mined ethereum block, and I show it in a fancy way.

    2023 · timeevidence.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    VSCode extension with games (Snake, Plinko, slots), HN/LessWrong reader, and Pomodoro timer for AI coding wait times. Fake currency only. Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TouchGra... Built in a week with Claude Code after seeing Chad IDE get ratio'd for integrating real gambling. Happy to answer questions or get roasted on the code.

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24AM

    For the past few months, I’ve been hacking together Hive: a retro-style virtual workspace for devs who love building in public. It’s a bit rough but already has some cool features: - AI-powered presence to represent you when you’re offline. - Live video streaming to showcase your work in real time. - VS Code integration to broadcast your status live. - GraphQL API for full customization and hackability (such as using your own agents) - Web3 donations to support and get support from other builders. In this demo, you can claim a desk by walking up to it and pressing E, then personalize it with…

    2024 · joinhive.devmode.digital · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →