Install Bithaus, give it a free brain, reach it privately from your phone, and hand it a lifelong memory. Everything below is free and stays on your Mac.
Open the app and your pixel companion is home. No account, no sign-up. Bithaus lives on your Mac and manages it from there.
Download the Bithaus app, drag it to Applications, and open it. On first launch macOS may ask you to confirm , that is normal for a new app.
Your companion greets you in whichever world you pick. Try the chat: ask it "how full is my disk?" It answers from your real machine, on-device.
Bithaus thinks with a local model so it costs nothing and works offline. Ollama runs that model on your Mac.
Grab Ollama from ollama.com (free), install it, and it runs quietly in the background.
A 7B instruct model is a great balance of speed and quality on Apple Silicon:
ollama pull qwen2.5:7b-instructThat is your free, offline brain (Medium mode). Later you can optionally connect a heavier hosted model for the toughest tasks, but you never have to.
Reading is always free and safe. Anything that changes your machine , writing files, running a command, clearing caches , waits behind a single toggle.
In the companion panel, turn on write access when you want it to do work. Turn it off and it goes back to read-only. Destructive actions still ask first, and deletes go to the Trash, never permanent.
Every action comes back with a plain-English summary. No silent changes, ever.
Serve Bithaus over Tailscale, a free private network just for your own devices. Your phone talks to your Mac directly and encrypted , nothing is exposed to the public internet.
Install Tailscale on your Mac and on your phone (free), and sign in with the same account. They join the same private "tailnet" and can see each other by name.
On your Mac, expose the app's local port to your tailnet (Bithaus serves on port 8080):
# share localhost:8080 privately on your tailnet
tailscale serve --bg 8080This does not open any port to the internet. Only your logged-in devices can reach it.
Find your Mac's private name in the Tailscale app (MagicDNS gives it a name like your-mac.tailnet.ts.net). Open that in your phone browser and Bithaus loads , the full companion, on your phone, wherever you are, still running entirely on your Mac. Add it to your home screen for an app-like icon.
Point Bithaus at a free Obsidian vault and your companion gains a durable, private memory plus a knowledge library , notes it reads and writes, that follow you across devices for free.
Obsidian is free (obsidian.md). Create a new vault, for example a folder called Companion Brain. A vault is just a folder of plain Markdown files , yours forever, no lock-in.
In Settings, set the memory folder to your vault path. Bithaus will store what it learns as notes there, and read them back for context, so it gets sharper over time and remembers your preferences.
# the vault is just a folder of Markdown , inspect it anytime
~/Documents/Companion Brain/Put the vault in your iCloud Drive folder and Obsidian syncs it across your Mac, iPad, and iPhone at no cost. Now the companion's memory is the same everywhere, and you can browse or edit it yourself anytime.
Yes. Bithaus runs on your Mac and talks to a local model. There is no account and no cloud round-trip. Your files, chats, and machine data never leave your device.
No. With a local model via Ollama, Bithaus works fully offline. The internet is only needed if you optionally use a hosted model or a web-search tool.
Yes. Bithaus uses a free on-device model through Ollama for its everyday brain, so there are no usage fees. You can optionally connect a paid plan for a heavier model when a task really calls for it, but you never have to.
Install Tailscale on your Mac and phone (both on the same free tailnet), then serve the Bithaus port over the tailnet with tailscale serve --bg 8080. Open your Mac's private name in the phone browser. It is encrypted and never exposed to the public internet.
Bithaus can read and write notes in a free Obsidian vault, giving the companion durable memory and a knowledge library. Sync the vault with iCloud and its memory follows you across devices, all for free.
No. Reading is always safe. Actions that change your machine wait behind a write-access toggle, destructive ones ask first, and deletes go to the Trash. Every action is reported back in plain English.