Show HN: AirmailAI, a BYOK LLM chat app with a browser extension backend

Posted by blake__dev 11 hours ago

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Hi everybody! I recently launched AirmailAI: a fast, secure, and private bring-your-own-keys LLM chat app that uses a browser extension as the backend. FAQ and design/security info is available on the website. Happy to answer any questions!

Comments

Comment by mys1 10 hours ago

Do you envision this taking context from the webpage the user is on, similar to how Chrome's Gemini extension works?

Comment by blake__dev 10 hours ago

Not particularly, this is more designed to be a separate chat app than a chat-with-the-webpage extension. Also, parsing webpages for LLM ingest is not the easiest thing in the world in my experience. You could dump the whole html but that's a LOT of tokens to be spending if you're using your own API key (vs using a subscription model like with first party extensions).

Comment by AdityaK_9999 11 hours ago

What is the difference between this Chat application and the others...what does this aim to achieve

Comment by blake__dev 11 hours ago

Before I started work on it, I looked around at all of the available options, and none of them really fit what I wanted:

- easy to use

- fast

- not a huge desktop app

so I decided to make my own! AirmailAI (if you're not running it locally) is a one-click install from the Chrome Web Store, the TTFT overhead is within 50ms of raw https API requests, and the install size/memory requirements are very reasonable (<2MB on disk, ~60MB RAM while running).

Comment by ramon156 10 hours ago

name some examples. easy to use is opinioned,

Comment by blake__dev 10 hours ago

Sure. I tried Open WebUI, SillyTavern, AnythingLLM, etc. I wasn't a fan of installing a 500MB desktop app, or having to run a webhost locally, or having to configure a bunch of settings just to chat with the newest LLM.