Hob

Hob is a desktop AI assistant that runs open-weight language models entirely on your own computer. It is built by Frigade as a free, MIT-licensed alternative to Claude and ChatGPT, aimed at people who want the same kind of file-and-tool assistance without sending their documents to a cloud service.

Hob inspects your hardware and downloads the largest model your machine can run well, then handles the setup itself. The curated lineup includes Google Gemma 4 variants (E4B Compact on 8 GB Macs, E4B on 16 GB, 26B from 24 GB) and OpenAI gpt-oss 120B for workstations, plus a small Qwen3-VL model for images. It works on files, folders and projects with their own instructions, reads and fills PDFs, analyzes spreadsheets, writes and runs Python in a sandbox, draws interactive charts, and searches the web through a metasearch plugin that runs locally. File changes require approval and can be undone, and the app is translated into 32 languages.

Like Claude and ChatGPT, Hob is built for agent-style work rather than single questions: it plans steps, calls tools, and returns finished documents you can open and edit. The difference is privacy and cost. Chats, files and the model stay on the machine, there is no account or subscription, and web access can be switched off for fully offline use. The trade-off is hardware: you need at least 8 GB of RAM, and output quality on smaller machines depends on the lighter model Hob selects. Hob ships as a native app for Apple Silicon Macs, Windows and Linux rather than a self-hosted web service, and its skills, Python tools and MCP connectors are extensible through plugins.