Alternatives
Products that do what I built an offline open-source RAG system DataBridge does
Hey HN! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for data ingestion and querying across text, PDFs, images, and videos. In our latest update, we’ve added a fully local deployment option: - No internet required – Runs entirely offline. - Customizable Models – Supports any LLM and embedding model via Ollama (with options for any other private providers) - Extensibility – You can plug in your own models or tools easily. This local-first approach ensures better privacy, security, and flexibility, especially for teams dealing with sensitive data. You can…
- 1TA
I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...
2024 · embedding.io
- 2DA
For the past few weeks, I've been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for easy data ingestion and querying. We support text, PDFs, images, and as of recently, we've added a video parser that can analyze and work well over frames and audio. We are also adding object tracking to improve video ingestion and context, and plan to do this for various data types. To get started, you can find the installation section in our docs at https://databridge.gitbook.io/databridge-docs/getting-starte.... There are a bunch of other useful functions and examples available there.…
2024 · github.com
- 3SA
Hey there! This is Dan and Ustin (@uzarubin), and we want to share something cool we've been working on for the past year - an open-source `tail -f` for your data, with a UI. We call it "Streamdal" which is a word salad for streaming systems (because we love them) and DAL or data access layer (because we’re nerds). Here's the repo: https://github.com/streamdal/streamdal Here's the site: https://streamdal.com And here's a live demo: https://demo.streamdal.com (github repo has an explanation of the demo) — — — THE PROBLEM We built this because the…
2023 · github.com
- 4IJ
Hi HackerNews, Lately, I have seen an explosion in posts offering paid APIs/services to get unstructured data into LLMs (i.e. langchain extract, ragflow, unstructured, unstract, just to name a few) and I have been largely disappointed by them, either because they fail to implement multimodal support, fail to give good context for "really tricky" PDFs / Word docs / Powerpoints, or are just plain difficult to use. In light of all these posts I figured I'd share my solution that has been working smoothly for me and my clients. I put it up on GitHub for free so you can check it…
2024 · github.com
- 5AO
I've built an airgapped Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for question-answering on documents, running entirely offline with local inference. Using Llama 3, Mistral, and Gemini, this setup allows secure, private NLP on your own machine. Perfect for researchers, data scientists, and developers who need to process sensitive data without cloud dependencies. Built with Llama C++, LangChain, and Streamlit, it supports quantized models and provides a sleek UI for document processing. Check it out, contribute, or suggest new features!
2024 · github.com
- 6AE
Hi all, Sharing a repo I was working on for a while. It’s open-source and includes many different strategies for RAG (currently 17), including tutorials, and visualizations. This is great learning and reference material. Open issues, suggest more strategies, and use as needed. Enjoy!
2024 · github.com
- 7CF
Over this past month I had the idea to build a 100% open-source MIT-licensed tool to simplify sharing code with LLMs, without the vendor lock-in you get from most SDKs. Right now, it’s way too hard to export your data or work freely with models like o1 PRO or Grok 3, especially since they don’t even have API access. So I built OpenRepoPrompt, an open-source tool from wildberry-source that serializes files and folders into XML for LLMs. I coded/designed from 12PM -> 11PM on Saturday and 8AM -> 11PM on Sunday. There are still tons of features missing (I'm working on better file filtering…
2025 · github.com
- 8IB
Hey all! I wanted to share this project I've been working on that can maybe help you or your developer friends out. I built a RAG system for our product a while back and didn't realize how easy they were to get started. So I put together my learnings into this online course. It's not quite ready but if you sign up and mention HackerNews, I can get you early access. I'm looking to get feedback on the following: (1) materials — is it engaging & did you learn something? (2) UI/UX of the platform — did you have any issues that prevented you from starting or finishing the tutorial? (3)…
2024 · takehomes.com
- 9HA
Demo starts at 50m into the video. This was a bit terrifying to record because 2am the previous night everything was totally broken after a major refactor (so that we could add external LLM support as well as local GPUs). But pressure can be a useful force :-D We start with a stack deployed on my laptop without a GPU, pointing to together.ai so we can run open source LLMs easily without having to have access to a GPU. We show simple inference through the ChatGPT-like web interface (with users, sessions etc) and then simple drag'n'drop RAG. Then we show some helix apps defined as yaml: Marvin…
2024 · youtube.com
- 10IM
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
- 11CA
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
- 12IB
Hey HN, I built a website where you can train Llama 3.1 8b & 70b (4bit) on your data. I use unsloth in the backend and the training is done on H100s which I rent programmatically from Runpod. I'd love some feedback. If you would be interested in using it feel free to book a chat with me: cal.com/hamada/tunellama-intro Happy to give you free credits :) P.S. I'm also looking for a co-founder as I have big plans for this.
2024 · tunellama.com
- 13
100% offline RAG for engineers who can't use cloud AI
19d ago · philyeh.gumroad.com
- 14SV
Hi HN, I'm Daniel from Superlinked! We have built an open-source framework that improves vector search relevance and usefulness by combining structured metadata with unstructured data in your embeddings. We included self-hostable API server that sits between your data sources and vector database. Docs: https://docs.superlinked.com/ We're launching our cloud offering soon where you can use Superlinked to orchestrate high-performance retrieval for RAG, Search & Recommendation apps in your own cloud. Looking for feedback and happy to answer questions!
2024 · github.com
- 15WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 16MM
Hi HN, we're Arnav and Adi, and we're building DataBridge - a multi-modal database built from the ground up with AI use cases in mind. We recently launched support for ColPali-style image embeddings and late-interaction retrieval. We've implemented a hamming distance version of retrieval which helps this approach scale significantly more when compared with the regular late-interaction similarity scoring. These embeddings provide a significantly better retrieval accuracy, with ColQwen achieving around an 89% average score on the ViDoRe benchmark, compared to around 67% for traditional parsing…
2025 · github.com
- 17WB
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
- 18IB
Hey HN, I've been working on something cool that I wanted to share with you all. It's called Viewpoint, an analytics tool for LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic models, and Gemini. The idea came from the constant flood of new LLM models and the need to figure out which ones work best for my projects without breaking the bank. With viewpoint, I can track token usage, costs, latency(WIP), and traffic over time, making it easier to compare different models and see which ones perform best and save money. The tool works asynchronously, so it doesn't add any latency to your LLM requests, and you have…
2024 · viewpointhq.com
- 19IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 20RG
Hey HN, I wanted to share something I’ve been working on: *RAG-Guard*, a document AI that’s all about privacy. It’s an experiment in combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with AI-powered question answering, but with a twist — your data stays yours. Here’s the idea: you can upload contracts, research papers, personal notes, or any other documents, and RAG-Guard processes everything locally in your browser. Nothing leaves your device unless you explicitly approve it. ### How It Works - * Zero-Trust by Design*: Every step happens in your browser until you say otherwise. - * Local…
2025 · github.com
- 21HM
I made this as a pair programming exercise with o1-preview. o1 did most of the heavy lifting, through high level prompts, but eventually I needed to diverge from it to get to completion. My initial prompt was: --- I'm making a web app: It's like 4chan, but each thread starts with a gps coordinate. People can only post text and images. I want to build it with flask and sqlalchemy. I want just the backend and data model that supports these threads, anonymous users, and users that can register a permanent username. Write as much of it as you can for me. --- This produced a fully scaffolded…
2024 · mapchan.com
- 22IM
Hi there! I've been working with data in one form or another, professionally, for about 5 years. I've been thinking about my own personal data and how it's used for at least twice that long. I've been sort of building something in my head for a while that solves my own problem and, in the beginning of this year, I found the opportunity to spend some time building it out. I'll leave the detailed explanation to the blog post but, in short, I built what amounts to an API crawler combined with a data processor to help you download your personal data from 3rd party services and work with it using…
2024 · joshcanhelp.com
- 23PU
After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com
- 24BV
DataBridge is a multimodal database for building multi agent AI systems. It's open source and can run fully locally (with easy model swaps to run your favorite models). Github: https://github.com/databridge-org/databridge-core Docs: https://databridge.gitbook.io/databridge-docs
2025 · youtube.com
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