Why self-hosted and BYOK, not a subscription

A lot of “AI-native” games ship as a thin client in front of somebody’s API, gated behind a monthly fee, with your saves living on a server you don’t control. We built Aikami the other way around, and it was a deliberate choice, not a missing feature.

One abstraction, three ways to run it

All text, image, and voice generation in Aikami flows through a single abstraction — AiProviderGateway — so the product code never has to know or care which mode is active. That abstraction currently supports:

• Offline / local — Ollama for text, ComfyUI for images, Kokoro for voice, all running as Docker microservices on your own hardware. No network required after the first pull.
• BYOK — bring your own key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, ElevenLabs, Stability AI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Your key, your rate limits, your bill, sent directly to the provider.
• Service (coming soon) — fully managed, pay-as-you-go hosting on our own infrastructure, for people who’d rather not run Docker at all.

A text engine is required to actually play — that’s the core of the game. Image and voice are optional flourishes on top of it, and the LPC sprite system covers the visual baseline with zero AI dependency either way, so a completely offline, completely free setup is never a degraded experience — it’s a fully supported one.

Local-first, not local-only

Firebase — auth, and optional cloud sync/backup — sits on top of the local stack and is never a boot dependency. Your campaigns, saves, and chat history live in a local Turso (libSQL) database by default. Your world plays and saves fine without ever signing in; signing in just gets you continuity across devices if you want it.

Why this is a philosophy, not a phase

Aikami is MIT licensed — free and open source, forever. The managed “Service” tier that’s coming is meant to remove setup friction for people who want it, not to become the only way to play. If we ever ship something where self-hosting stops being a first-class option, that’s a bug, not a business model.

Run it on a homelab box, run it on a laptop with an API key, or wait for the managed tier — all three are meant to feel like the same game.