NitroAI

Your study set

Ready

Notes

Cards

Quiz

On your phone?

You install NitroAI from a computer. Send yourself the link and open it there.

Before you start: Notes, flashcards and quizzes run on publik API with no key to paste — linking your publik account gives $0.05 of free use once, then the app pays publik's published price per use, and your own key still works. Fully local mode is still there

Available for macOS and Windows.

Built on Publik APIBuild yours →

Runs on publik API

AI chat & tools: Chat completions with tool calls, JSON schemas and images, priced per tier in dollars.

No key to paste.
Linking your publik account gives five cents of free use, once.
Then NitroAI pays publik's published price per use, and your own key still works.

How pricing works

Vote on NitroAI

Read the install guide Open in GitHub

Compared with

Turbo AI

$239.88/year

What a month of AI costs

Turbo AI$19.99/mo
publik API$4.33/mo

publik API: $15.66 a month less than Turbo AI.

100 uses a week at the Balanced level, the one NitroAI uses most · publik API is cheaper up to about 461 uses a week

Make this yoursFork NitroAI, change it, publish your version. About 30 minutes. No experience needed.

2,434 downloads through publik

Having trouble? Tell us

Where NitroAI’s AI runs, and what it costs

Prices are for one typical use: one request of about 1,500 words sent and 375 words back. A higher quality score is better.

On your computer

Price: Free per use. Your computer does the work.
Runs with: Ollama
Memory: Llama 3.1 8B is a 4.9 GB download at 4-bit. gpt-oss 20B runs on systems with as little as 16GB memory. Faster with Apple silicon or a graphics card.
Quality: Llama 3.1 8B: 7

publik API

Price: $0.0100 per use, $10.00 per 1,000 usespublik-balanced, the level NitroAI uses most
Quality: MiMo-V2.6-Pro: 46
Setup: Built in. No key to paste; linking your publik account gives $0.05 of free use, once.

Your own key

Price: $0.0013 per use, $1.31 per 1,000 usesMiMo-V2.6-Pro at OpenRouter’s list price, before its fee for buying usage
Quality: MiMo-V2.6-Pro: 46
Setup: Open a provider account, add a card, paste the key into NitroAI.

Quality and price, side by side

Quality score and cost per 1,000 typical uses for local models and the three publik API levels
Model	Quality	Per 1,000 uses
On your computer (Ollama, 4-bit download size)
Granite 4.2 3B2.2 GB	9	$0
Phi-4 Mini2.5 GB	6	$0
Llama 3.1 8B4.9 GB	7	$0
gpt-oss 20B14 GB	9	$0
Gemma 4 31B20 GB	19*	$0
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B24 GB	19*	$0
publik API
publik-fastGLM-5.3 Flash	42	$1.00
publik-balancedMiMo-V2.6-Pro · NitroAI	46	$10.00
publik-smartGPT-6 Sol	48	$18.00

Quality: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, read 2026-09-22 (publik API models 2026-09-25); * = estimated by Artificial Analysis. Sizes: the Ollama library, read 2026-09-22.

What you pay for

On your computer: nothing per use. You pay in disk space, memory and electricity, at lower quality.
publik API: publik’s published price for each use, in dollars, from your publik balance. It is above the model’s cost; the difference runs publik and pays the app’s builder.
Your own key: the provider’s price, billed to an account you keep with the provider.

Install NitroAI: publik API is built in How publik API pricing works

How to install NitroAI

Every step written out. No terminal experience needed. Pick your setup.

README

Open in GitHub

Turn any lecture, PDF, or video into study notes, flashcards, quizzes, and a study chat — free, and private by default.

How it works

NitroAI is a small desktop shell around a local web app. When you open it, the app starts a tiny local server on your machine, shows it in a window, keeps it alive, and shuts it down when you quit. That local server is what does the things a plain web page can't — extracting YouTube transcripts with yt-dlp and managing the local AI runtime — so you never install those tools by hand.

Three ways to run the AI

You pick one on first launch (and can switch any time in Settings):

publik API (default in the packaged builds) — NitroAI sets itself up on first launch, after you accept a short disclosure. Every request is priced per use at 50% of the model's published list price; audio transcription, podcast voices and embeddings are passed through at cost. Most people spend under $2 a month. A new computer starts at $0.00 and no card is asked for: linking it to your publik account gives $0.05 of free use, once per account, and a plan, a pack or your own key takes it from there. Right after setup the app shows your balance and why it costs money, with a button to link the computer and pick a plan (you can also do that later from Settings). Until you link, add a plan or pack, or paste your own key, every publik API request answers 402 and the app shows the link button instead. Your prompts go through publik's servers to a shared model account; publik does not keep them after the reply and never trains on them. The install's key lives in ~/Library/Application Support/publik/apps/nitroai.json (mac) / %LOCALAPPDATA%\publik\apps\nitroai.json (Windows), readable only by you, and never leaves the app's local server. Builds without a publik app token (forks, npm run app without PUBLIK_APP_TOKEN) simply don't offer this option.
Fully local — when you choose this, NitroAI automatically downloads and starts a local AI runtime (Ollama) and pulls a small, capable model (~2 GB, one time). Everything then runs on your device: no key, no cloud, no cost. Provisioning only ever happens if you pick local — cloud users never download a model.
Use my own key — paste an OpenAI (sk-…), Anthropic (sk-ant-…) or publik (pk_…) key for the highest-quality notes, quizzes, chat, and podcast voices. The key is stored only on this computer and used only to call your provider directly. A key you enter yourself is never overwritten by the publik setup.

Your notes and generated content live only on your machine (in the app's local database); you can export everything from Settings at any time.

Signing your own builds

By default the release workflow produces ad-hoc-signed builds — valid, but not notarized, so users get a one-time OS warning. If you have signing certificates, add them as GitHub repo secrets (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions) and every tagged build is automatically signed and notarized — installers then open with no warning at all. No code changes needed; the build detects the secrets.

macOS (needs a paid Apple Developer account and a Developer ID Application certificate):

Secret	What it is
`CSC_LINK`	Your Developer ID Application cert, exported from Keychain as a `.p12`, then base64-encoded: `base64 -i cert.p12 \| pbcopy`
`CSC_KEY_PASSWORD`	The password you set when exporting the `.p12`
`APPLE_ID`	Your Apple ID email
`APPLE_APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD`	An app-specific password for that Apple ID (not your login password)
`APPLE_TEAM_ID`	Your 10-character Team ID (Apple Developer → Membership)

Windows (optional — needs an Authenticode code-signing certificate):

Secret	What it is
`WIN_CSC_LINK`	Your code-signing cert as a base64-encoded `.pfx`
`WIN_CSC_KEY_PASSWORD`	The `.pfx` password

publik API (optional — makes publik the default engine in your build):

Secret	What it is
`PUBLIK_APP_TOKEN`	The `pat_…` app token publik issues for this app. Baked into the build (`extraMetadata.publik.appToken`); without it the build offers only Local and your own key. It identifies the build, not the user, and publik rate-limits what it can mint.

Then cut a release: git tag v0.1.3 && git push --tags. That's it — nothing else to configure.

Tech

React 19 · Vite · Tailwind · Electron shell · publik API (default) · Ollama (local) · OpenAI / Anthropic (your own key) · KaTeX · FSRS spaced repetition. No backend of its own, no telemetry, no account required.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Fork it, ship it, improve it — just keep it open.

Where NitroAI’s AI runs, and what it costs

Prices are for one typical use: one request of about 1,500 words sent and 375 words back. A higher quality score is better.

On your computer

Price: Free per use. Your computer does the work.
Runs with: Ollama
Memory: Llama 3.1 8B is a 4.9 GB download at 4-bit. gpt-oss 20B runs on systems with as little as 16GB memory. Faster with Apple silicon or a graphics card.
Quality: Llama 3.1 8B: 7

publik API

Price: $0.0100 per use, $10.00 per 1,000 usespublik-balanced, the level NitroAI uses most
Quality: MiMo-V2.6-Pro: 46
Setup: Built in. No key to paste; linking your publik account gives $0.05 of free use, once.

Your own key

Price: $0.0013 per use, $1.31 per 1,000 usesMiMo-V2.6-Pro at OpenRouter’s list price, before its fee for buying usage
Quality: MiMo-V2.6-Pro: 46
Setup: Open a provider account, add a card, paste the key into NitroAI.

Quality and price, side by side

Quality score and cost per 1,000 typical uses for local models and the three publik API levels
Model	Quality	Per 1,000 uses
On your computer (Ollama, 4-bit download size)
Granite 4.2 3B2.2 GB	9	$0
Phi-4 Mini2.5 GB	6	$0
Llama 3.1 8B4.9 GB	7	$0
gpt-oss 20B14 GB	9	$0
Gemma 4 31B20 GB	19*	$0
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B24 GB	19*	$0
publik API
publik-fastGLM-5.3 Flash	42	$1.00
publik-balancedMiMo-V2.6-Pro · NitroAI	46	$10.00
publik-smartGPT-6 Sol	48	$18.00

Quality: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, read 2026-09-22 (publik API models 2026-09-25); * = estimated by Artificial Analysis. Sizes: the Ollama library, read 2026-09-22.

What you pay for

On your computer: nothing per use. You pay in disk space, memory and electricity, at lower quality.
publik API: publik’s published price for each use, in dollars, from your publik balance. It is above the model’s cost; the difference runs publik and pays the app’s builder.
Your own key: the provider’s price, billed to an account you keep with the provider.

Install NitroAI: publik API is built in How publik API pricing works

Secret

What it is

CSC_LINK

Your Developer ID Application cert, exported from Keychain as a .p12, then base64-encoded: base64 -i cert.p12 | pbcopy

CSC_KEY_PASSWORD

The password you set when exporting the .p12

APPLE_ID

Your Apple ID email

APPLE_APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD

An app-specific password for that Apple ID (not your login password)

APPLE_TEAM_ID

Your 10-character Team ID (Apple Developer → Membership)

Secret

What it is

WIN_CSC_LINK

Your code-signing cert as a base64-encoded .pfx

WIN_CSC_KEY_PASSWORD

The .pfx password

Secret

What it is

PUBLIK_APP_TOKEN

The pat_… app token publik issues for this app. Baked into the build (extraMetadata.publik.appToken); without it the build offers only Local and your own key. It identifies the build, not the user, and publik rate-limits what it can mint.