Local is a macOS app that runs fully private AI directly on your own machine. We built it for completely frictionless setup. It tunes itself to your hardware, so chat, coding agents and meeting notes run up to 5.4x faster on the same hardware, without your data ever leaving the device. No cloud. No accounts. No cost. "Office Mode" let's you run AI on the fastest machine in the office and every laptop can connect to it.
Everybody is talking about local AI at the moment. It solves the privacy issue and it's also completely free. But it used to be a pain to set up. That's why we built Local. It's completely frictionless. It optimised itself to your hardware, recommends the right models you can actually run and removes all the complexity of on-device AI. Hope you like it :)
The hardware auto-tuning is the part I want to verify. I have tried a few local inference setups that claimed to optimize themselves but still needed manual model config to get decent throughput on an M3 Pro. If Local handles that without any manual tuning, what context window does it target by default, and can I override it for longer coding sessions without undoing the hardware fit?
Cool! Does it only work on Apple Silicon processors? I have a 2020 MacBook Air, the last model with an Intel chip. Would it work on mine?
Congrats on the launch. I'm curious if you ran tests on different hardware specifications and if you noticed an ideal setup for certain models and what the bare minimum requirements are.
LLM costs can get messy really quickly. Having a smarter way to balance price and performance feels like a problem worth solving.
If you're curious about the engine that makes Local the fastest AI inference app on Apple silicon, check out BaseRT and the research behind it: https://www.basecompute.co/research
About Local on Product Hunt
“Zero (!) friction local AI for your Mac”
Local launched on Product Hunt on August 21st, 2026 and earned 104 upvotes and 6 comments, placing #10 on the daily leaderboard. Local is a macOS app that runs fully private AI directly on your own machine. We built it for completely frictionless setup. It tunes itself to your hardware, so chat, coding agents and meeting notes run up to 5.4x faster on the same hardware, without your data ever leaving the device. No cloud. No accounts. No cost. "Office Mode" let's you run AI on the fastest machine in the office and every laptop can connect to it.
Local was featured in Privacy (11.3k followers), Artificial Intelligence (476.5k followers) and Apple (15.5k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 129.9k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Local?
Local was hunted by Lukas Wesemann. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Local stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Lukas Wesemann