Whelk is out. iPhone, iPad, and Mac in the stores, today, and the terminal client with them. Android is in open beta through the Discord. Free for individuals, all of it.
The shape is simple: a single server on hardware you own and a client on every device you carry… nothing in between.
One server powers everything. Whelk Server is one binary. Put it on a Mac mini, a Linux box, a NAS, anything that runs quietly in a closet. It routes your models, your agents, and your connectors from one address on your own network, and every Whelk client talks to it. That is the whole architecture. No Whelk cloud, no account, no relay. The company runs no servers, so there is nothing to breach and nothing to meter.
The agent harness became a commodity this year, the same way the model did. Whelk Server treats it that way. Point it at opencode, at pi, at DeepSeek Harness, and the loop runs on the server against your repo while the approvals land on your phone. Any harness that speaks the Agent Client Protocol plugs in. Whelk wins one level up: the clients, the sealed record of what was said and what it was allowed to do, and the private network that drives all of it.
Best-in-class clients. The clients are native. Swift on Apple, Compose on Android, a shared Rust core underneath. They feel like the frontier-lab apps because that was the bar. Every conversation is a chat. Arm it with an agent backend and it becomes a Work session in place, same thread, same record. Approve a diff from the lock screen. Open the same session on the Mac and the record is intact. The terminal client ships too. Android is in open beta through the Discord. Linux is in early access. Windows is in testing.
Join the Discord. Private AI is not a product category. It is a group of people who decided the meter was optional. They run open weights on Apple Silicon, on a 3090 in a garage, on a Studio under a desk, and they trade notes on what works. That group has a room now. Come show your setup, break something, and tell me what to build next.
Whelk is free for individuals on every platform. Teams adds the shared layer at $19 a seat. getwhelk.com