Simplicity

A free, private, Perplexity-style answer engine that runs entirely on your computer. No account. No subscription. Your searches never leave your machine — a local search engine does the searching, and answers come from your own AI models: free local ones, your existing Claude subscription, or your own API keys.

⚠️ Starting point, not a finished product

This is an early beta — a starting point. The core loop (search → sources → cited answer) is solid and tested, but edges are rough: some surfaces are still being brought to parity, and things will change fast. Use it, break it, tell us what broke.

What it does

• Search-first answers — every factual question triggers real web retrieval through your own local SearxNG metasearch (7 engines, no single point of failure), then the model writes a cited answer. The model never gets to "answer from memory" on facts.
• Behind-the-scenes transparency — watch the exact search queries, every source found, and each research step as it happens.
• Deep research — a capped multi-round research loop that scrapes and reads pages, then writes a long-form sectioned report.
• Model council — up to 3 models from different vendors answer the same question in parallel from the same sources; a chair model compares them and calls out where they agree and disagree.
• Price per query — every answer shows exactly what it cost you ("$0.0042 · 12.4k tokens", per-model breakdown). Local models and Claude-subscription answers show Free.
• Your models, your choice — pick per message: local Ollama (free), your Claude plan (free), or GPT-5.1 / Gemini 2.5 Pro / Claude Opus 4.8 / Grok on your keys. Nothing is locked.
• Incognito threads — flip the lock and the thread is never written to disk.
• Export — Markdown, PDF, or CSV of any answer.
• Private by construction — searches run through your local metasearch, chats live in a local SQLite file, API keys stay on your device. There is no server of ours to send anything to.

Credits & license

Simplicity is a fork of Vane by ItzCrazyKns (the successor to Perplexica) — an excellent foundation, rebuilt here as a desktop app with a search-first retrieval pipeline, model council, cost tracking, and the rest of the feature set above. MIT licensed, same as upstream.