APISelf

Local-first API,MCP,SaaS ecosystem with no subscriptions

Productivity

API

Artificial Intelligence

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Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I'm a solo dev, and APISelf is the thing I've been pouring my nights into for the last 9 months. No team, no investors - just me and a lot of coffee. How did this all start? I still remember when you bought software once and your data lived on your own machine, not the way it usually works now, where you pay every month and end up owning nothing. And it keeps spreading. Subscriptions everywhere, SaaS for everything. Need to generate a QR code? There's a monthly plan for that. Need to compress a PDF? Subscribe to a service packed with ten other tools you'll never touch. I wanted a different option: download an app, run it locally, and own it. A few clicks and that's it, no Docker gymnastics, no editing config files, no wiring up paths and libraries. That's why APISelf exists. I call the apps "Boxes". You install APISelf Manager (https://apiself.com/install), open it, pick a Box, and it's running on your machine in a few clicks, on Windows, macOS or Linux. The Manager is free, and so is the Free tier of every Box. That's really the whole pitch. There are 18 Boxes in the catalog today such as peer-to-peer file transfer, a storage gateway, documents and PDFs, QR and barcodes, forms, notifications, transcription, screen recording, AI chat and image generation, and more. A few things I'd like to highlight: - Your data stays on your machine. And when a Box uses cloud AI, it runs on your own API key, kept in a local encrypted vault - APISelf never sees it. - Every Box exposes a real local API, fully documented with Swagger, so you can hit it with curl, your own scripts, whatever. It also speaks MCP, so Claude Desktop or Cursor can use your Boxes as tools right out of the gate. - Boxes can talk to each other, so instead of ten disconnected apps you can wire them together into something that actually fits how you work. - Every Box comes in tiers - Free, Trial, Basic and Pro. You start on Free, try the paid features on the Trial, and only if a Box turns out to be genuinely useful and you need more from it (or simply want to support my work) do you buy Basic or Pro. One-time payment, no subscription. - Boxes ship in stages too - alpha, beta, rc and stable. The higher tiers (Basic/Pro) can only be bought once a Box reaches rc or stable, so you're never paying for something that's still early. Now the honest part: it's just me, so not every Box is perfectly polished or 100% bug-free yet. I won't pretend otherwise. There's a feedback button right inside the Manager, if something breaks or feels clunky, let me know and I'll do my best to fix it quickly. I'd genuinely like to build this together with the community, developers, companies, curious tinkerers rather than pretend it's all perfect on day one. I'm putting the whole ecosystem out today, and I'll keep shipping individual Boxes over the coming weeks. Two things I'd really love to hear from the community: - If you try a Box and something feels off, tell me exactly what. Honest feedback is more than welcome. - Which Box would actually make your day easier, something already in the catalog, or something that doesn't exist yet? That's what I want to build next. I'll be around in the comments all day. Thanks for taking a look!