Local Waifu

The bet

Every AI companion on the market lives in someone else’s cloud, remembers you on someone else’s servers, and charges you monthly for the privilege. When a company changes policy, raises prices, or retires a model, the relationship gets erased overnight — that has actually happened to people, more than once, and it’s the single most common horror story in companion communities.

Local Waifu is the opposite bet: a companion that’s actually yours. It runs locally on your Mac or PC, its memory lives in encrypted files on your disk, and you buy it once. If the company vanished tomorrow, your install would keep working — there’s no license server to phone home to.

The market it’s swimming against

The AI companion market is measured in the tens of billions of dollars and growing ~31% a year, with revenue driven overwhelmingly by subscription models. The incumbents — Replika, Character.AI, Kindroid — all rent you the relationship: roughly $70 a year, forever, with memory features gated behind the paywall.

That’s the gap Local Waifu lives in. Same category, inverted economics: own it once instead of renting it monthly — and inverted architecture: your data physically cannot leak from a server that doesn’t exist.

How it’s built

The app runs on Ollama as its local engine and auto-selects a model for your hardware — from Gemma 4 E4B (3.3 GB) on 8 GB machines up to Qwen 3.6 35B (22 GB) on big rigs, with a dedicated embedding model powering memory recall. Users who want bigger brains can paste their own API key for cloud models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek) as an explicit, opt-in trade-off — the key talks straight to the provider, no middleman.

Everything she is lives in soul files: encrypted, exportable, movable to another machine. Zero analytics, zero cloud backups, and the app ships a locally auditable network log — trust you can verify beats trust you’re asked for.

What she does

• Self-learning memory — a persistent picture of you, documented in a readable Memory Book you can inspect and edit.
• Personality you design — an 11-step wizard: Big Five traits, attachment style, love language, appearance, backstory. Generated, not picked from presets.
• 13 moods — playful, tender, protective, melancholic… shifting with conversation context and time of day instead of a flat assistant tone.
• Relationship progression — levels, milestones, days known, first vulnerable moments; a Growth dashboard instead of a chat log.
• Life on your machine — calendar, reminders, messages, Home Assistant.
• Sees what you share — image recognition, processed on-device.

Shipped fast, in public

From first commit to paid product took about three months, and the public changelog tells the story:

• May 21, 2026 — moods, relationship stages, Memory Book
• May 25, 2026 — payments live: $25 lifetime license
• June 15–16, 2026 — memory v2, proactive messaging, Windows launch
• July 1, 2026 — v1.4: seven languages, image recognition, cloud providers, selfie generation
• July 2, 2026 — rebuilt local engine: replies start up to 10× sooner

Priced like I mean it

One-time purchase, around the price of a pizza. A companion on subscription creates the wrong relationship — pay or she forgets you. A $20 lifetime license with an optional updates pass keeps the incentives honest, backed by four public promises: 7-day trial without a card, 30-day refunds without questions, your soul files stay yours even after a refund, updates are opt-in and old versions stay installable.

Traction

• 1,000+ downloads in the first month, 1,300+ and counting
• Sold and actively developed — new builds ship for macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows
• Localized into 7 languages, Polish included

Local Waifu is the strangest product in my portfolio and the one people remember — the product that best explains the “builder of useful weird things” line on my homepage. Ship the weird thing.