I've been running self-hosted AI agents for a while. Tools like OpenClaw and Hermes do this well and were a big inspiration, but they're CLI/dev-first and headless. I wanted that kind of power with a real, mobile-friendly UI my non-technical wife could actually use from her phone. I couldn't find it, so I built it for my own household and open-sourced it. Not claiming to reinvent anything (there's a new "AI agents platform" every other week right now), I just took the UI-first angle.
Self-hosting fundamentals:
- Single Docker container. Bun + SQLite, no Postgres, no Redis, no external cloud. All state in one volume.
- Light enough to run on a small home server.
- Secrets are stored in an AES-256-GCM encrypted vault and never sent to the LLM provider.
- Reachable over Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Signal and Matrix.
- Bring your own keys: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter (an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for llama.cpp / LM Studio / vLLM is in progress).
- MIT, actively maintained.
The parts I focused on (where having a UI actually pays off):
- A proper web UI that works on mobile, not a terminal.
- Full transparency into what the model sees: you can inspect the exact context sent to the LLM and the token cost of every message. No black box.
- Tool calls rendered visually in the chat with custom renderers (a weather call shows a weather card, not raw JSON).
- Mini-apps embedded in the UI: small interactive apps, dashboards, even live background services.
- Create your own tools from inside the platform, instantly reusable by any agent.
- A Kanban board to manage projects and tickets the agents work on.
- A plugin system (NPM) to add providers, channels, tools and more.
- Connected accounts with triggers (e.g. an incoming email can wake an agent).
- A workspace file browser and terminal, in the UI.
- Conversational setup: an onboarding agent walks you through configuring everything.
- Image generation and TTS/STT built in.
Install:
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -v hivekeep:/app/data ghcr.io/marlburrow/hivekeep:latest
Open the web UI and the setup agent takes it from there.
GitHub: https://github.com/MarlBurroW/hivekeep Site + demo: https://hivekeep.app/
It's young and I'm after honest feedback. Disclosure: I'm the author, happy to answer anything.
This sounds like chatgpt