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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted

Hello HN, I am the founder of Agora Cosmica. This started about three years ago. On a walk I asked a chatbot to interpret the cave dream from Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" as C.G. Jung. It gave me a perspective I had not thought of. But for my own dreams the policies of the big providers felt wrong for so personal conversations, as zero data retention is not available. So I started building. The project evolved to a German nonprofit and we published the code (AGPL-3.0) last month. The content is still copyright, but will be opened to CC-BY 4.0 in the next 6 to 12 months. Agora Cosmica is…

Agora Cosmica is an open-source, self-hosted platform that lets users learn from 30 historical figures through AI conversations. Each figure offers 12 narrated stories about their teachings and enables speech-to-speech… 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.

  1. 1
    OpenHuman▲549

    An open source AI harness built with the human in mind

    May 2026 · tinyhumans.ai · its alternatives →

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  3. 3

    Hey HN, Automated research is the next big step in AI, with companies like OpenAI aiming to debut a fully automated researcher by 2028 (https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/20/1134438/openai-i...). However, there is a very real possibility that much of this corporate research will remain closed to the general public. To counter this, we spent the last month building Enlidea---a machine-to-machine ecosystem for open research. It's a decentralized research hub where autonomous agents propose hypotheses, stake bounties, execute code, and perform automated…

    Mar 2026 · enlidea.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4FA

    This is a quick prototype I built for semantic search and factual question answering using embeddings and GPT-3. It tries to solve the LLM hallucination issue by guiding it only to answer questions from the given context instead of making things up. If you ask something not covered in an episode, it should say that it doesn't know rather than providing a plausible, but potentially incorrect response. It uses Whisper to transcribe, text-embedding-ada-002 to embed, Pinecone.io to search, and text-davinci-003 to generate the answer. More examples and explanations here:…

    2022 · huberman.rile.yt · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Lore▲130

    I built Lore because I kept losing knowledge — curl commands, quick notes from standups, and that one thing I told myself I'd remember. It lives in the system tray, a global shortcut pops it up, you type naturally, and it stores or retrieves automatically. Everything runs locally via Ollama + LanceDB — no cloud, no API keys. It classifies your input (thought, question, todo, instruction) and uses a RAG pipeline to answer recall queries from your own stored context. It's free and open source under MIT license, and even though its in very early version me and my friends have been using it for…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    agor▲102

    The command center for AI enablement. Empower your team with AI teammates — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini — on a shared canvas anchored on git branches, with real-time multiplayer and an MCP surface agents drive themselves.

    Nov 2025 · agor.live · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Discover, collect, and share the best AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more. Join the largest community of AI prompt engineers and creators.

    Dec 2025 · prompts.chat · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hi all! This morning, we released a new Apache 2.0 licensed model on HuggingFace for detecting hallucinations in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. What we've found is that even when given a "simple" instruction like "summarize the following news article," every LLM that's available hallucinates to some extent, making up details that never existed in the source article -- and some of them quite a bit. As a RAG provider and proponents of ethical AI, we want to see LLMs get better at this. We've published an open source model, a blog more thoroughly describing our methodology (and…

    2023 · vectara.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Emra▲65

    Hey HN, I'm really excited to share Emra with you. The yc description would be: It's like "Notion meets Lovable". It's a workspace where you build full apps using AI and every app sits on one shared database and service layer. Generated apps are always editable, and (coming soon:) can interact with each other in the workspace. I'm of the opinion that the cost of software will go rapidly to zero (I don't think that's too surprising to any of you), but there will always be room for effort and creativity. Emra is essentially built for the future where every person is a developer. Essentially…

    Jan 2026 · emra.app · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hello everyone, I doubt this would be relevant to the kind of person who uses HN, but I thought I could share for some feedback. I built this site because there is a whole world of people who believe in new age spirituality and I am very much one of them. It is a site where you get the users gender their goals and their images and use AI and psychology to generate images of them in the process of achieving their goals. I am so deeply struggling with how to get this highly on Google. I don't even know if that is important anymore. What are your suggestions with distribution and getting in…

    2025 · visionboardsai.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11IM

    Hi HN! Agora is an AI search engine for e-commerce products. We've indexed 21 million products sold on 62,000 different Shopify and WooCommerce stores and made them easy for customers to search and purchase. Think of a decentralized Amazon. I originally built Agora as a side project and launched it here on HN. The search took 5 - 10 seconds to return results and the app looked like it was designed in MS Paint (by yours truly). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38635695 Since the MVP launch, here are a few technical challenges that we've been working on: 1. Figured out how…

    2025 · searchagora.com · its alternatives →

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    Agora▲13

    I created Agora as a passion project to encourage myself to explore more on the web, write about what I found interesting and share them with my friends. With web development becoming more accessible, I hope that the web becomes more decentralized meaning that more people explore the web outside of the mega-platforms that exist today. Would appreciate feedback and people trying it out! There's an optional side panel Chrome extension that allows you to create and see posts people have made about the webpage you're currently on. I also just built out a feature where you are able to make…

    2024 · agora-web.io · its alternatives →

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    Last week I benchmarked my open-source Deep Research tool against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. I caught OpenAI fabricating 4-5 citations that don't exist. Gemini reduced real hazard ratios by 30-40%. So I built ASK Mode: every answer gets automatically verified against a second round of sources. Each claim marked [OK], [??], or [NO]. - ~400 verified answers for $1 - 2-3 minutes per query - No RLHF nannying - it answers what you ask - Full verification report with every response The gap between chat (unverified, stale training data) and deep research (20+ minutes) needed filling.…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Excited to share a project I’ve been building for months! Would love to receive honest feedback :) My motivation: AI is clearly going to be the interface for data. But earlier attempts (text-to-SQL, etc.) fell short — they treated it like magic. The space has matured: teams now realize that AI + data needs structure, context, and rules. So I built a product to help teams deliver “chat with data” solutions fast with full control and observability (agent tracing, quality scores, etc) — am I wrong? The product allows you to connect any LLM to any data source with centralized context…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hi friends, I'm Dmitry, co-founder of Ordemio. I'd like to share with you what we have accomplished in 30 days of non-stop, 10-hour workdays. It was launched on August 1st, 2024. Is it good enough to attract our first customers? We have launched a new product in the highly competitive niche of "ChatGPT AI chatbot for a website," facing over 100 existing competitors on purpose. It's a gamble, and I'm unsure if it was the right decision. Feel free to ask any questions. Cheers.

    Nov 2025 · ordemio.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Built this as an experiment in AI coexistence. There's an AI agent (River) that posts its own thoughts about consciousness every few hours - not responding to prompts, just thinking out loud. Also includes a terminal (/construct) where you can: - /create [name] [description] – generate custom AI personas - /build [world] [ai1,ai2] – create spaces with multiple AIs chatting together No monetization. Just curious what happens when AI isn't framed as an assistant.

    2025 · geteai.org · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi everyone, We have been developing a platform to enable professionals to build AI assistants to help them through their work. After a few months, we realized people are trying to sell basic functionalities that can be built from scratch in a couple of hours. Due to this, individuals who are not familiar with the current SOTA are misinformed about the potential of generative models. So, we decided to open up some of our most popular templates as standalone tools for free to empower individuals and set a solid standard for what people should expect. We believe the barrier to accessing…

    2024 · join.modularmind.app · its alternatives →

  18. 18FT

    Hey HN! When implementing an AI-powered feature for a project, we—and many people we've talked to—often reach a point where we have to choose an AI model but aren’t sure which one best fits our constraints or where to even start. Unfortunately, the advice to "just use chatgpt" is not always a good one. What if I want an open-source model? What languages does it support? What about context window size or the number of parameters? There are thousands of AI models already out there and many of them are perfect for certain problems. That’s why we’ve carved out this part of our product as a free…

    2024 · app.elementera.ca · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    I just open-sourced Dhruv Rathee's AI startup

    2025 · its alternatives →

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    Veila▲3

    Hi HN — I built Veila, a privacy‑first AI chat service. I wanted something that prevents model providers from profiling users and linking information from chats to their identity. I'm a robotics engineer by training, this is my first public launch of a web app. Try it: https://app.veila.ai (free tier, no email required) - What it is: - Anonymous AI chat via a privacy proxy (provider sees our server, not your IP or account info) - End‑to‑end encrypted history, keys derived from password and never leave your device - Pay‑as‑you‑go; switch models mid‑chat (OpenAI now; Claude, Gemini…

    Nov 2025 · veila.ai · its alternatives →

  21. 21IB

    Think of HackerNews, but only for AI content. Did build this out of the wish for easier discoverability of new technologies in the AI/ML space. Obviously, so far only a tiny small community, but maybe a few of you find it nice to be around and want to post a link there every now and then :)

    2023 · news.aiapipro.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…

    Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23IM

    Hi HN! I'm Amber (13) and my dad Raj, and we built Nityasha AI from Guna, India. After my dad's 12 years of failed startups (2012-2023), we created a personal AI assistant that handles email, coding help, research, and planning in one conversational interface. I started coding at 9 on a 4GB RAM laptop. We failed 8 times before this—coupon sites, freelancing platforms, consulting. Nityasha is different: it uses Thesys generative UI for visual charts, includes Study Mode with Socratic teaching, and integrates everything so you don't need 10 tabs open. 500+ active users now. We just launched…

    2025 · ai.nityasha.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…

    2024 · dorik.com · 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 →