If you would like an AI “personal agent” but don’t want your data on some opaque cloud computer, there’s a new option that appears to be somewhat nicer: [rociiu] has talorys, an AI agent that runs in your Cloudflare account. True, it is still on a cloud computer, but it is your account on a cloud computer. It is designed so you can use it on Cloudflare’s free account with reasonable limits, and the code running is all on GitHub, so you can — if you are so inclined — look to see what it is doing. The data, too, is all in your cloud instance.

This seems like a reasonable compromise. Cloudflare provides the hosting, and the software in your virtual computer does all the work. At least, that’s how it is promoted. Honestly, we haven’t combed over the code, but the assertion is “Free-tier friendly… no telemetry.”

We are fairly sure they are using Cloudflare’s AI engines, too, so it would be interesting to see how much of your data they could, in theory, harvest in transit. Of course, your data is still in the cloud, so if you are really worried about privacy, this might not be for you. But since everything is in your account and open, you can at least have more control over what’s there. For example, you can easily download or delete your data. You can even see exactly what prompts it uses.

Are there downsides? Sure. The tool can’t integrate with your calendar, for example. It can’t deal with e-mail, nor can it search the web. It won’t write code for you. This isn’t meant to be a general-purpose chatbot replacement. It is more like an AI tool for keeping a task list.

While Cloudflare does have a free tier, it does have daily limits, and you may hit them. And, of course, if things like this get too popular, they could reduce those limits. The system does let you export your data, though.

It isn’t flawless. We asked it to set up three recurring meetings. It got one right, put the other one in for Sunday instead of Monday (even though the title said Monday), and hit a Cloudflare rate limit and failed to create the third one. We asked it to retry the failed one once, and it didn’t work. So I waited a bit and tried again. It claimed it worked. However, when I looked at the schedule, it wasn’t there.

We then asked it to fix the Sunday schedule and add the one it had missed again. It did add it that time. It also added the Monday meeting, but despite saying it would delete the Sunday one, it didn’t. I manually deleted it.

Installation is easy. You can connect a domain you own to Cloudflare or use the subdomain on pages.dev that they give you, which works fine. You run a single command on your computer. It handles authentication to the server and sets up all the services and data stores.

So essentially it is a to-do, reminder, and note-taking system. However, it does work well when it works. It can remember things and will find things it remembers or in notes very easily. Can you do that with non-AI tools? Of course. Not to mention, any of the “big” chatbots can do all of that and more. But not in your own hosted server account.

Besides, it is interesting that for small uses, Cloudflare offers plenty of free-tier compute resources that might come in handy for other projects. It is nice to have some free cloud-based computers, as we noted in a recent Linux Fu post where we used Oracle’s free servers.