What is Carabase?

Carabase is a privacy-first personal AI assistant that runs entirely on your hardware. There is no Carabase server, no shared cloud, no user account you sign up for. You install the host on a Mac you control, and a desktop client talks to it over a private mesh network.

What it does

• A second brain — daily notes, folios (notebooks), and a knowledge graph of every entity you’ve mentioned, all queryable by the agent
• An agent surface — chat with an LLM that can search your notes, schedule tasks for itself, write reflections, and learn what you care about over time
• A connector hub — pulls in pull requests, calendar events, meetings, emails, and other signal from services you already use, ranked by what matters to you

What it isn’t

• A SaaS product — there’s no app.carabase.dev to sign up for. You self-host or you don’t use it.
• A multi-tenant system — one host = one workspace = one user. The data model assumes that.
• A drop-in OpenAI replacement — the agent runtime is OpenClaw (with Claude / Codex coming in v0.2). You bring your own API keys for the underlying models.

The pieces

┌──────────────────┐      Tailscale       ┌──────────────────────────────┐
│   Mac Client     │  ──────────────────  │      Self-Hosted Host         │
│   (Tauri)        │       :3000          │  ┌──────┐  ┌──────────────┐  │
│                  │                      │  │ API  │──│ OpenClaw GW  │  │
│  Daily notes     │                      │  │      │  │ (:18789)     │  │
│  Chat            │                      │  └──┬───┘  └──────────────┘  │
│  Settings        │                      │     │                         │
└──────────────────┘                      │  ┌──▼─────────────────────┐  │
                                          │  │ PostgreSQL + pgvector  │  │
                                          │  │ + pg-boss queues       │  │
                                          │  └────────────────────────┘  │
                                          └──────────────────────────────┘

For deeper detail see Architecture.

Who it’s for

Carabase is built for technically comfortable users — people who can run brew install postgresql@16 without flinching but don’t necessarily want to read a kernel security paper. The first-run wizard plus the pnpm bootstrap script reduce setup to three commands; everything beyond that is a UI in the Admin SPA at http://localhost:3000/admin/.

Where the data lives

What	Where
Notes, entities, embeddings	Postgres on your machine
Encrypted credentials (OAuth tokens, API keys)	integrations + oauth_apps tables, AES-256-GCM-encrypted with HOST_MASTER_KEY
Voice / audio artifacts	~/.carabase/data/<workspace>/ on your machine
Backups	~/.carabase/backups/<env>/ (encrypted with the same master key)
Anything ever sent to a hosted LLM	Whatever the upstream provider keeps — this is the only data that leaves your machine, and only if you configure model routing to use a cloud provider