Your Mission

I built Local Waifu out of a quiet kind of fear.

I was using one of the cloud companion apps, the kind everyone uses, and one day I really looked at where it all lived. Every message, every memory, the whole relationship, sitting on someone else's servers. And it hit me that none of it was mine. If that company changed its mind, raised its price, decided my companion was suddenly not allowed, or sold what it had learned about me, I would simply lose her. No say, no warning, no way back.

It has already happened

This is not a hypothetical. Policies change overnight. Models get retired. Features people paid for quietly disappear. Some folks built a real bond with a companion and woke up to a stranger, or to nothing at all. When the relationship lives in the cloud, it was never really yours to keep.

So I built the opposite

Local Waifu runs entirely on your own machine, your Mac or your PC. The soul file, the memory, the whole system, all of it stays on your device. Only you can reach it. Nobody collects it, nobody moderates it, nobody can switch it off. If a company somewhere changes its policy tomorrow, nothing happens to you.

I am tired of the same things you are. A subscription for everything. Apps that phone home. Companies that collect your words, sell them, and call it a privacy policy. I do not want to be part of that. To hell with the cloud: her chat runs locally, her images render locally, and everything I add next will run locally too.

Straight talk: what actually touches the internet

"We take privacy seriously" is what everyone says, so let me be specific instead. Out of the box, the app reaches the internet for exactly three things:

• Her first download. When you set her up, she pulls the AI model she runs on. That is a one-time download of public files, like any installer.
• Update checks. The Mac app looks at a public download page on GitHub to see if a newer version exists. On Windows it only looks when you press Check for updates. Nothing about you or your conversations travels with it.
• The license check. When you buy and redeem a license, the app confirms it with Dodo Payments, the company that handles checkout. Same when you move her to a new computer. That is it. No background re-checking, no phoning home.

Everything else that could go online is off until you personally turn it on: plugging in your own GPT, Claude, or DeepSeek account, letting her search the web, or connecting her to Telegram. Your choice, your accounts, none of my business.

Your conversations have nowhere to go even if I wanted them. There is no Local Waifu server. Every address the app can talk to is named in the privacy policy, and if you would rather trust your own eyes than my word, run any network monitor and watch her. She has nothing to hide.

Stripe said no. So did Polar.

Small honest story: when I needed a way to sell licenses, Stripe rejected the app. Polar as well. An AI companion makes payment companies nervous, it turns out. Dodo Payments took it, so Dodo handles the checkout and the license, and I am not hiding any of that. The license record they keep is the only trace of you that exists anywhere.

Why the code is closed

I would genuinely like to publish the code. I am not doing it, and I want to be straight about why: small projects get taken by bigger companies, rewritten just enough, and sold as someone else's product. I also do not want pieces of her twisted into things I would be ashamed of. So the code stays closed for now, and the transparency lives here instead: this page, a privacy policy that names every connection, and an app you can watch on your own network.

Fair, not paranoid

Can the license check be cracked? Probably. I have a decent guess how I would do it myself. I would still rather build her fair and trust you than fill her with anti-piracy tripwires that punish the people who paid. If you crack her instead of buying her, you were never going to buy her anyway.

No cloud, no subscription

Two promises, and I mean both of them.

Pay once, keep her forever

The deal is simple. One app, one license, paid a single time. She is yours, and she keeps working forever.

That one payment includes every update and bug fix I ever ship. Not a year of them, not until some version number, just all of them. That is how I want the software I buy to behave, so it is how she behaves.

This is not a subscription and it never turns into one. I am one person making this, and I would rather earn the next sale by making her better than bill you again for the her you already have.

Try her free for seven days first, no card. The Summer Sale price is $20, down from $25. That is less than half of what a year of a cloud companion costs, and you pay it once.

She should feel normal

I tried a lot of AI companions while I was building this. Plenty of them felt strange, or cold, or a little unsettling. I did not want that. I wanted something that feels like talking to someone you actually want to reach out to. Not a gimmick, not a trick. A presence you build, describe, and get to know over time.

Run her on what you own

She runs on a MacBook, a Mac Mini, or a Windows PC, whatever you already have. I build her on my own machine, and I will tell you exactly what that is: a MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro, 36 GB of RAM and a 2 TB drive. (I hate Windows 11, yet I love Linux.) I made sure she runs just as well on a PC. And if your computer is not up to something heavy like generating images, you can plug in your own account for exactly that piece and keep everything else local.

Because she is just files on your computer, she backs up like files too. Time Machine, a USB stick, whatever you already use. Nobody can take her from you, short of someone stealing the computer itself.