ChatGPT costs $20/month. I built an alternative for $2.99.

NOLO — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:28:29 +0000

I use AI every day. But $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus felt excessive for casual use. And the free tier is too limited to be useful.

So I looked for alternatives. Everything I found either had the same pricing problem, required an account, or used weak models that couldn't handle real tasks.

I decided to build my own.

What NOLO is

NOLO is an AI chat app with access to powerful models, real-time web search, and image understanding. No account required. No email. You open it and start chatting.

Plans start at $2.99/month. The free tier gives you enough credits to try it properly before deciding.

Why no account

Partly privacy, but mostly friction. The fewer steps between a user and the product, the better. No signup form means no drop-off at signup.

You get a random anonymous ID when you open the app. That's it.

The stack

Vanilla JavaScript, Node.js on Vercel, Groq for inference (genuinely the fastest I've tested), Supabase for credit tracking.

Built in one month as a side project. Now trying to make it real.

Where I am

Zero users. Launching on Product Hunt this Tuesday.

If you've ever felt like AI tools are too expensive or too complicated to get started with, NOLO is for you. Try it and tell me what's missing.

Why I built an AI assistant that doesn't know who you are

NOLO — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:23:03 +0000

Every AI assistant on the market asks for the same things: your email, your name, sometimes your phone number. Then they store your conversations, analyze your usage, and use your data to improve their models.

I get why they do it. Accounts mean retention metrics. Data means better models. It makes business sense.

But it also means that every question you ask an AI is being logged somewhere, tied to your identity, and kept indefinitely.

I wanted something different. So I built NOLO.

How it works

When you open NOLO, you get a random anonymous ID. No email. No signup. No personal information of any kind. Your conversations are not stored on our servers. There are no logs.

You still get access to powerful AI models, real-time web search, and image understanding. The privacy is the only thing that changes.

The technical side

The stack is simple: vanilla JavaScript on the frontend, Node.js serverless functions on Vercel, Groq for inference, and Supabase only for credit tracking (no conversation data, ever).

I chose Groq because the inference speed is genuinely faster than anything else I tested, which matters a lot in a real-time chat interface.

Where I am now

One month in. Zero users. Launching on Product Hunt this Tuesday.

The product works. Distribution is the hard part now.

If you care about privacy, I'd love for you to try it and tell me what you think.

DEV Community: NOLO

ChatGPT costs $20/month. I built an alternative for $2.99.

Why I built an AI assistant that doesn't know who you are