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AI · alternatives · 2026

IB

24 alternatives to I built an on-device LLM based chatbot for iPhones

I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…

This is an on-device chatbot app for iPhones, iPads, and Macs built with SwiftUI that runs a quantized language model locally without internet. It uses a fine-tuned 3-billion-parameter model optimized for natural… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I built an on-device LLM based chatbot for iPhones launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hi Hackers, Excited to share a macOS app I've been working on: https://recurse.chat/ for chatting with local AI. While it's amazing that you can run AI models locally quite easily these days (through llama.cpp / llamafile / ollama / llm CLI etc.), I missed feature complete chat interfaces. Tools like LMStudio are super powerful, but there's a learning curve to it. I'd like to hit a middleground of simplicity and customizability for advanced users. Here's what separates RecurseChat out from similar apps: - UX designed for you to use local AI as a daily driver.…

    2024 · recurse.chat · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    I spent the last few days building out a nicer ChatGPT-like interface to use Mistral 7B and Llama 3 fully within a browser (no deps and installs). I’ve used the WebLLM project by MLC AI for a while to interact with LLMs in the browser when handling sensitive data but I found their UI quite lacking for serious use so I built a much better interface around WebLLM. I’ve been using it as a therapist and coach. And it’s wonderful knowing that my personal information never leaves my local computer. Should work on Desktop with Chrome or Edge. Other browsers are adding WebGPU support as well - see…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4IB

    Hi HN, I built this out of frustration of the evergrowing list of AI models and features to try and to fit my workflow. The visual approach clicks for me so i went with it, it provides more freedom and control of the outcome, because predictable results and increased productivity is what I’m after when using conversational AI. The app is packed with features, my most used are prompt library, voice input and text search, narration is useful too. The app is local-first and works right in the browser, no sign up needed and it's absolutely free to try. BYOAK – bring your own API Keys. Let me…

    2024 · grafychat.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Combine the best AI/LLMs to build your Custom ChatGPT

    2023 · edenai.co · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hello HN! I've been thinking about the idea of a LLM thats a clone of me - instead of generating replies to be a helpful assistant, it generates replies that are exactly like mine. The concept's appeared in fiction numerous times (the talking paintings in Harry Potter that mimic the person painted, the clones in The Prestige), and I think with LLMs, there might actually be a possibility of us doing something like this! I've just released a fork of the facebookresearch/llama-recipes which allows you to fine-tune a Llama model on your personal WhatsApp conversations. This adaptation can…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8IB

    We show the potential of modern, embedded graph databases in the browser by demonstrating a fully in-browser chatbot that can perform Graph RAG using Kuzu (the graph database we're building) and WebLLM, a popular in-browser inference engine for LLMs. The post retrieves from the graph via a Text-to-Cypher pipeline that translates a user question into a Cypher query, and the LLM uses the retrieved results to synthesize a response. As LLMs get better, and WebGPU and Wasm64 become more widely adopted, we expect to be able to do more and more in the browser in combination with LLMs, so a lot of…

    2025 · blog.kuzudb.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    A simple mobile web app inspired by Fuzzy-Search/realtime-bakllava that uses llama.cpp server backend with multimodal mode to describe and narrate what the phone camera sees. I built this thing in a few hours using a single ChatGPT thread to generate most things for me and iterate on this project. Here's the workflow: https://chat.openai.com/share/ea84ec69-5617-45e8-8772-ac2dcf...

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Dolly▲113

    Democratizing the magic of ChatGPT with open models

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11IB

    I'm lost between ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini... which subscriptions to take? With Cursor and all these specific AI tools, I just wanted one simple chat app where I can use any model and pay only when I use it. Couldn't find one, so I built one. Pay only for what you use. Your prompts and docs, knowledge bases work with every model - no more copy-pasting between apps. Started as a personal project, but thought someone else might benefit from this too. https://prismharmony.com/chat What do you think?

    2025 · prismharmony.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Lekh AI▲80

    Run powerful AI models on your Mac:fully offline and private

    Jan 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13TF

    I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    This is like ChatGPT but simpler, with less features (for now). It offers unlimited access to o3, Claude Sonnet 4 and other models for the pro plan. It offers access to o4-mini and the like for the free version. Requests are unlimited up to rate limits that we hope apply to less than 2% of users (they're transparent and can be seen on the account page). I was sick of having these like t3.chat or abacus.ai that give you very few messages for the $8-$10 / month subscription, so wanted to create something closer to Cursor's new pricing but transparent. Image generation will come soon, I…

    2025 · donsir.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hello HN! I was fed up switching between multiple UIs to ask GPT, Claude, etc… the same question and comparing the answers. So I built a way to ask multiple models the same question efficiently by having the LLM compare the responses and only show you new and valuable information from the 2nd model. This way you still get a fast response as normal from the 1st model, but also get any added value provided by the 2nd model. Initially I built my own UI to use this, but stumbled upon Open WebUI (formerly Ollama WebUI) which is fantastic, but is made more for local access to LLMs. So I talked to…

    2025 · polychat.co · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I trained the 65b model on my texts so I can talk to myself. It's pretty useless as an assistant, and will only do stuff you convince it to, but I guess it's technically uncensored? I'll leave it up for a bit if you want to chat with it. I posted this to Reddit and had several hundred people talking to it. Salient points from that discussion: LLAMA 1 65b Rank 128 5 epochs Batch size 1, 256 cutoff Trained in the Oobabooga suite using bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization for the lora Loss around 1.5 seems to give the most coherent results Trained on raw text dumps that is then parsed by a crappy…

    2023 · airic.serveo.net · its alternatives →

  17. 17CA

    Hey folks, we created a ChatGPT alternative for anyone to try out LLaMA models and benchmark responses across OpenAI's models and other open source models. Would love some feedback! No data is being used for retraining models.

    2023 · chat.nbox.ai · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A UI Kit for Transactional LLM apps

    2025 · mrikal.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19DO

    Hey HN, I have been working on a side project for the last 3 months, built around LangchainJS and pgvector. It now supports ChatGPT, Llama, Claude, and Bison models, and the bot can integrate with WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord for now. I would really appreciate some feedback. Thanks! repo: https://github.com/n4ze3m/dialoqbase

    2023 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    A powerful AI chatbot based on Llama-3.1

    2024 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey all, During Christmas and new year I was building this app day and night, I basically built it for my own use, I've got so much headache switching between tabs of different LLMs and chatbots, and other ai chat apps were missing some features that I really really wanted: - be able to chat with multiple models at once - be able to do debate with multiple models so thats why I built it, I launched it 2 days ago, 0 users so far, I really appreciate any feedbacks. I offer free plan with 20 message / day in some cheap models (I'm indie dev with no budget) and 2 plans that gives you higher…

    Aug 2026 · omny.chat · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    My puny version of ChatGPT. This was based on the excellent LLM lecture series by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY The main points of differentiation are that my version is token-based (tiktoken) with code to load up multiple text files as a trining set. Plus, it has a minimal server which is a drop-in replacement for the OpenAI REST API. So you can train the default tiny 15M parameter model, and use that in your projects instead of ChatGPT. I trained it on 20Mb of Project Gutenberg encyclopaedias, then fine-tuned it on 120 dad jokes, to get a Q: A:…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23GL

    Hey everyone! I made a Mac app for exploring large language models. It’s fast, small, has a tiny memory footprint. It’s immutable by design with both immediate time travel and automatic versioning as foundational elements. The app is written in Swift and a bit of Rust for the tokenizer. I used SwiftUI for structure and animations and Cocoa for advanced behavior. All storage is SQLite and local-only. You can go through the database as needed and backup it as well. The app has support for variants, which is the `n` parameter in the OpenAI chat completion API—equivalent to the drafts feature in…

    2023 · thellm.app · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Access Gemini Pro, Claude Pro, ChatGPT Pro models and more for $8/month. Is it another AI/LLMs wrapper? Yes. So why should I use it? Honestly right now there are a lot of other alternatives. But here's why I think it's useful enough to release it in early access: 1. Clear & transparent pricing model. Usage rates is the same is providers api rates + 10%. 2. LLMs responses don't rely on the client connectivity. We use Convex. It's super stable. You can even run multiple chats in parallel. 3. Use it if you like the design :) 4. We have a very clear roadmap. What's next? A desktop app…

    2025 · oneaichat.app · 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 →