DEV Community

Amrendra N Mishra
Amrendra N Mishra

Posted on

5 AI Tools You Can Run Locally for Free in 2026

Are you paying for AI APIs? Stop. Here are 5 tools that run on your laptop for free.

1. Ollama

Run any LLM locally:

brew install ollama
ollama pull llama3.2
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Now you have GPT-level AI on your machine. No API key needed.

2. ChromaDB

Free vector database. Store embeddings locally:

import chromadb
client = chromadb.Client()
collection = client.create_collection("docs")
collection.add(documents=["AI is amazing"], ids=["1"])
results = collection.query(query_texts=["tell me about AI"])
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

3. Whisper

Offline speech recognition by OpenAI:

import whisper
model = whisper.load_model("base")
result = model.transcribe("audio.mp3")
print(result["text"])
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

4. LangChain

Build AI apps that connect to your data:

from langchain_community.llms import Ollama
llm = Ollama(model="llama3.2")
print(llm.invoke("Explain Docker in 2 lines"))
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

5. MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Connect AI to any tool — files, GitHub, databases. The USB-C of AI.

My Setup

I built 45 tools using these. All free. All local. All open source.

🔗 github.com/amrendramishra/ai-tools
🌐 amrendranmishra.dev


Follow for daily AI engineering content.

Top comments (0)