Both put a Mac Mini on your desk. Both promise personal AI. But they are fundamentally different products with fundamentally different approaches to your data.
Ostler: $99 Hub once + $9.99/mo Pro – AI on your hardware, your data stays on your hardware.
Perplexity PC: $50/mo – cloud AI with a Mac Mini shell. Inference runs on their servers.
| Ostler | Perplexity PC | |
|---|---|---|
| Your data | Stays on your Mac Mini | Sent to Perplexity’s cloud |
| AI inference | Local (Ollama) | Cloud (Perplexity servers) |
| Price | $99 Hub once + $9.99/mo Pro (unlimited local AI) | $50/month subscription |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Relationship intelligence | Yes (warmth, reciprocity, history) | No |
| Multi-platform import | 20 platforms via GDPR | No GDPR import |
| Personal wiki | Auto-generated, 21 page types | No |
| Conversation coaching | Longitudinal analysis | No |
| Web search | Yes (local via SearXNG) | Yes (core feature) |
| General knowledge | Local models (9B params) | Cloud models (frontier) |
| Independent security audit | Scoped | No |
Perplexity Personal Computer is a cloud AI with a local cache. The Mac Mini is an interface to their servers. Your queries, your data, your usage – all processed in Perplexity’s cloud. The local hardware is a UI device, not a processing device.
Ostler is a local knowledge graph with local AI. Nothing leaves your Mac Mini. The AI models run locally. The databases are local. Pull the ethernet cable and it keeps working.
If you want a powerful general-purpose AI assistant with web search, Perplexity is probably better. Their cloud models are larger and more capable than what runs locally.
If you want personal AI that knows your relationships, your conversations, and your life history – and you care about that data never leaving your house – that is what Ostler is built for.
Do you want a smart search engine that lives on your desk? Or do you want a personal knowledge system that is architecturally incapable of leaking your data? They are different tools for different problems. Perplexity answers questions about the world. Ostler answers questions about your life.
Perplexity charges $50 per month, forever. Ostler is $99 once for the Hub (yours forever) plus $9.99/month for Ostler Pro – cheaper monthly, and the Hub never expires.
If Pro pauses, your data stays and you can still browse, search, and ask Ostler questions about your existing snapshot. Only new-data ingestion pauses, and nothing is deleted or locked. Cancel Perplexity and you lose access to your cloud-stored data.
Perplexity’s privacy policy is standard cloud SaaS. They process your data on their servers. They promise to protect it. You have to trust that promise.
Ostler cannot access your data. Not “we choose not to” – there is no server to send it to. The AI models run on your Mac. The databases run as local launchd services. This is architectural privacy, not policy privacy.
We think that distinction matters for the most personal data category that exists: your relationships and conversations.
Local · Private · Yours