It searches, then it cites
Switch Web on and it can search and read pages by itself — everything it took from a page carries a numbered source you can open.
A 27-billion-parameter model running on your own GPU. No account, no API key, nothing metered. It can search the web when you switch that on — and it tells you every time it does.
Free · Apple silicon · 32 GB memory or more
Q6_K at 128k, if you paste long documents
Everything a good assistant does — reading, searching, citing, picturing — except the part where your words go to somebody else's server.
Streamed answers, a collapsible trace of what it thought about, tokens per second — and vision, so you can drop in a figure and ask about it.
Switch Web on and it can search and read pages by itself — everything it took from a page carries a numbered source you can open.
A fresh conversation reads 0%. Other apps bill their own hidden prompt to your window; this one measures it and subtracts it.
DuckDuckGo works out of the box. Bring a Brave or Tavily key if you would rather use those.
A pill in the header — green while there is room — split by what the model, the app and the rest of your laptop are using. Unload and it comes straight back.
Every other assistant sends what you type to someone else's computer. EdgeChat sends nothing at all — until you tick Web, and then only the words it needs to search with.
Nothing leaves this laptop.
Not the model, not your conversations, not telemetry — there is none
The few words the model picks to search with — not your message.
to DuckDuckGo
When a snippet is not enough and it wants to read the page itself.
to that page
A description of the picture you asked for. No key, no tool, nothing sent.
to FAL
EdgeChat is free, and so is the key that unlocks it. The key exists so the app knows which machine it is on, and so we can tell you when there is a new version.
An ordinary Mac app. Drag it to Applications and open it like anything else.
It shows a Machine ID and offers to fill the email in — recipient, subject and ID already there. The key comes back automatically, usually in a couple of minutes.
About 31 GB, resumable, straight from Hugging Face — or adopted in place if the same weights are already on your disk.
Your name, the assistant's name, how long the answers should run. Skip it and you get Nova with sensible defaults.
EdgeChat.app, dragged to Applications. Nothing is downloaded yet and nothing is loaded — the window opens on an empty chat.
With the Web toggle off, yes — the app makes no network request at all. The model is a file on your disk and it runs on your GPU. The only exceptions are ones you turn on yourself: web search, page reading, and image generation with your own key.
It works. On 32 GB the app installs the Q4_K_M build of the same model and sets the context window to 32k. On 48 GB you get Q8_0, or Q6_K if you would rather trade a little quality for a 128k window.
No. There is no subscription and no per-message charge, because there is no server on our side to pay for. The one thing that can cost money is image generation, which runs on your own FAL key and is off unless you add one.
Nova is the assistant's default personality, and she is a plain text file inside the app — including the part describing how she fails. Rename her during setup, edit the file, or write your own and she becomes someone else entirely.
They are files in ~/.edgechat on your own machine. Nothing is synced, nothing is analysed, and deleting them is deleting the folder.
So the app knows which machine it is running on, and so there is a way to tell you when a new version ships. Getting one is a single email that the app writes for you, and the reply is automatic.