Tomte — Private Home Assistant

Say no to “Big Data Center.”
Tomte is the AI assistant you own.

Tomte lives on your Mac. It reads your documents, searches fifteen years of your Messages, remembers what you tell it — and never sends a single byte to anyone’s cloud. Not ours. Not anyone’s.

Download for Mac See what it can do

Free of monthly fees, forever. Use is governed by the EULA.

Working from home. Always.

Don’t give your data to the AI overlords.

Every cloud chatbot has the same fine print: your questions, your files, your life — uploaded, retained, reviewed. Tomte’s privacy isn’t a policy. It’s architecture.

Local and 100% private The model runs on your own Apple Silicon. Your documents are read in place; your messages are indexed on disk. There is no server to breach, no account to leak, no “we may share with trusted partners.” Nothing you say leaves the house.

Zero monthly fees The only AI assistant you don’t pay rent on. No subscription, no metered tokens, no price hike next quarter. You buy Tomte once, and it’s yours — it keeps working even if we don’t.

You own it. Completely. The model lives on your disk. The index lives on your disk. The memory lives on your disk. Cancel the internet and Tomte doesn’t notice. Try that with a chatbot subscription.

It does more than ChatGPT — because it knows your house.

Cloud chatbots know the internet. Tomte knows you: the receipt from March, the address your brother texted in 2019, the warranty PDF you forgot you had. Ask in plain words; get an answer with the source right next to it.

	Cloud chatbots	Tomte
Where it runs	Their data center	Your Mac
Your documents	Uploaded to be read	Read in place — they never leave
Your Messages	No access	Fifteen years, searchable in seconds
Memory	Kept on their servers	Kept in your home, yours to edit
Works offline	Never	Always — the web is an errand, not a dependency
Price	$20+ a month, forever	Yours. No monthly fee

A house spirit, at work.

In Scandinavian folklore a tomte is the small, ancient spirit of the house: it works while the family sleeps, remembers everything that ever happened on the farm, and never — ever — leaves the property. That’s not a mascot. That’s a spec.

Searches your library PDFs, scans, photos of documents — OCR’d and indexed overnight, on device.

Knows your Messages The plumber’s number, the address from 2019 — found, with the message it came from.

Remembers on purpose Tell it once. It ties a knot. Memory you can read, edit, and delete — it’s just yours.

Reads pictures too Hand it a photo of a form, a label, a whiteboard. It looks. Locally.

Goes out only when asked Web search is the one errand that leaves the house — and it’s optional, visible, and yours to switch off.

Keeps the ledger Notes, lists, running records — kept in plain files you can open without us.

The lantern travels. The library doesn’t.

On your iPhone, without a cloud in between.

Tomte for iPhone pairs directly with your Mac over an end-to-end encrypted connection. Ask from anywhere; the answer comes from your house, not a data center. And a smaller Tomte lives right on the phone for when the Mac is asleep.

Coming to the App Store.

Quiet, like good help should be.

Moves in once “Tomte is moving in — about 11 GB, one time.” After that, no downloads, no login, no waiting on someone else’s uptime.

Works while you sleep Indexing happens overnight. By morning the whole library answers in seconds.

One keystroke away ⌥Space from anywhere on your Mac. Ask, get the answer with its source, get back to work.

Tomte lives on this Mac.
Nothing you say leaves the house.