Own AI by Owning Your Data: The Olares Way

As reliance on big tech–hosted services grows, so does the risk to your digital autonomy. Your data sits on someone else’s servers—subject to their terms, tracking, and potential censorship. With the rise of AI, the stakes are higher: your personal data is being harvested to train models you don’t control. This creates a fundamental dilemma: We want the benefits of AI without surrendering our data or digital autonomy.

We believe the only durable way to ensure AI serves you is to put you in control of the entire stack, starting with your data. That’s why we’re building Olares, an open-source personal cloud OS designed to put the power back in your hands.

A private cloud that’s as easy as a phone

Self-hosting has always been the best path for privacy, but let’s be honest—it’s often too complex. Olares makes controlling your digital life as intuitive as using your phone. You get a familiar desktop, an open App Store with 100+ applications (and growing), and one-click installs, all running on your local hardware with secure access from anywhere.

Your data, your rules

Olares is designed to empower you to own and manage your digital assets locally. You can easily create a private, versatile hub for your digital life:

Keep documents, family photos, and even sensitive home-camera footage synced across devices—without uploading to a public cloud.
Automate your workflows with N8N (an open-source alternative to Zapier), connecting your various apps and services to work together seamlessly, all under your control.
Host your own chat server with Mattermost or Matrix, ensuring your conversations are never scanned or monitored.
Use Olares as the central control point for managing IoT devices and home automation

Powerful, private AI on your terms

We have optimized Olares to run powerful open-source AI tools locally, so that you no longer need to upload your prompts, images, or documents to a black-box service. Through our App Store, you can one-click install and manage AI tools like:

Ollama + Open WebUI: Run state-of-the-art language models with a ChatGPT-like interface—where prompts and data never leave your system. Fine-tune on your private documents without exposure.
ComfyUI: Design and execute complex, node-based image generation pipelines entirely on your machine.
Dify: Build and manage AI applications that use your local models and local data.
Suna: An open-source AI agent that can help with various tasks, running securely in your own environment.

In addition, Olares is MCP-friendly (Model Context Protocol) by design. It allows for a more secure and tightly integrated environment where different AI services can work together seamlessly at the system level. This means you can compose complex workflows by chaining multiple local AI apps, all while keeping every step on your own hardware.

Built on a foundation of trust

We know that trust is earned. Here’s how Olares is architected for security and transparency:

Fully Open Source. We believe in transparency. The entire Olares OS is open for auditing and collaboration. Don’t just take our word for it—check out our code on GitHub and read our documentation.
Sandboxed Applications. Every app in our store runs in strict isolation with limited permissions for your network, storage, and system. A rogue app can’t touch the rest of your data.
Local-First Architecture. Your data and AI processing stay on your hardware. This is a structural guarantee of the Olares, not just a policy promise.

Our vision for an open ecosystem

Think of our model like Android: the Olares OS is fully the open-source operating system that can run on any compatible Linux server. Over time, third-party manufacturers can create hardware optimized for Olares. To ensure a seamless first experience, we’re shipping the first generation of hardware ourselves.

This is more than software—it’s a practical alternative to the surveillance economy. If you believe users should be in control of AI and your data, join us.