Open-source household AI

A household AI with a memory you can see.

He knows only what you've shown him.

Maurice runs on your own Mac. The notes, books and files you hand him are the whole of what he knows — nothing mined, nothing leaked, nothing kept that you didn't give. Small on purpose.

Download for Mac iOS TestFlight

Free & open-source · Notarized macOS apps · No Docker, no cloud account

Chez Maurice on iPhone — a Storyteller conversation

9:41

Bedtime story about whales

Today · 8:14 PM · The Storyteller

Tell me a story about a whale who collects sounds.

Once, in the deep grey water off the coast, there lived a young whale named Brume who kept the sounds she loved in a coral chest…

the creak of a harbour at dawn

a child laughing two bays over

She never kept a sound she hadn't been given. That was the whole of her magic.

Ask the Storyteller something…

Claude Sonnet 4.5

What makes Chez Maurice different

An assistant you tame, not one that watches you.

The memory is your own Markdown — visible, scoped, and shaped by deliberate action. Here's what that buys a household.

Memory you choose

He knows exactly what you hand him.

Load notes, book chapters, files and past conversations into a chat through the composer — and watch the token budget fill. Nothing else is in the room. The scope is the point.

A live 200k-token budget you can feel

Frozen snapshots — context never grows behind your back

Memory is plain Markdown in a git repo you own

mockup

The composer — the notes, books and files loaded into a conversation, with a live token budget

Context for this conversation

3 sources · loaded

Family recipesbaked-in to The Cook · 4 notes

The Flavour Biblebook · chapters 1–4 · summary 18.2k

Sunday lunch planningpast conversation 6.4k

Context budget108k / 200k

Specialized Maurices

Many Maurices, a hat for each.

Create a focused helper — a homework tutor, a trip planner, a storyteller — each with its own voice, model, creativity and bound context. The hat is a legible signal: a child knows instantly which Maurice they're talking to.

16 hat styles, each with its own palette

Bake notes & books straight into a persona

Restrict tools per persona — a kids' tutor with no web

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Specialized Maurices — a grid of hat personas, each with its own colour

Tutor

Explorer

Chef

Wizard

Captain

Detective

Storyteller

Gardener

One device, every mind

One iPad. Everyone's own Maurice.

Every member has their own conversations, notes and memories on the same device. Switching is a tap and a PIN — no logging out, no separate accounts to juggle. The kids share a screen without sharing a brain.

Per-member history, notes and personas

Host guests — and be a guest in another household

Roles for adults, children and guests

mockup

Who's here?

Tap your face to continue

PPaolaadmin

MMarcstandard

LLéochild · 11

NNoéchild · 9

And more

Built like a home, not a dashboard.

Bring your history

Import your existing threads from Claude and ChatGPT — the official export .zips — so your past conversations come with you, searchable.

Group chat, AI in the room

Several members can talk in one conversation and summon Maurice with @claude. He answers only when called — using the notes loaded into the room.

Households & guests

Run several households on one device, with guests who keep full capability but a limited reach — an explicit allow-list of people and personas.

Native apps, no Docker

Real SwiftUI apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac — and a single server process on your Mac. No container stack to assemble, no ops to keep alive.

Your models, your choice

Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral in the cloud, or local models through Ollama — switch per conversation, grouped by provider.

A browsable web garden

The same Markdown becomes a themeable website — private notes encrypted at rest, with four hand-made garden themes to choose from.

Get Chez Maurice

Three pieces. Start with the server.

The server is the engine — it runs on your home Mac and holds everything. The apps are how you reach it.

Start here

Chez Maurice Server

Required · macOS · notarized .app

The chat engine, the garden and your data. Runs quietly on your home Mac. Download, open, done — no build from source.

Download Server

v1.0 · Apple silicon · ~38 MB

Chez Maurice for Mac

macOS client

The full desktop experience — chat, hats, the composer, gardens and files — in a native Mac window. Pairs to your server.

Download for Mac

v1.0 · Apple silicon · ~24 MB

iPhone & iPad

via TestFlight

The same app on iPhone and iPad — built as one universal app. Join the TestFlight beta to install it on your devices.

Join the TestFlight

iOS 17+ · iPhone & iPad

How it all connects

Your apps talk to the server on your Mac over a private HTTPS link you choose.

Server on your Mac

data · garden · LLM calls

Tailscale / Cloudflare

Your devices

iPhone · iPad · Mac

The whole point

Maurice only knows what you've shown him. That limitation isn't a bug — it's the thing you can tame. He becomes yours through the relationship you build.

A father building an AI for his children · open-source · small on purpose

Why a Mac, and why no Docker

Maurice runs as one signed, notarized app on a Mac you already own — open it and it's running. No container stack to assemble, no compose file, no ops to keep alive at 2 a.m. That's a deliberate trade: a household shouldn't have to run infrastructure to own its own assistant. A Mac mini sitting quietly on a shelf is the whole deployment.

Mac-first also means the clients can be real SwiftUI apps rather than a browser tab pretending to be one. The cost is honest — if you want this on a Linux box or a NAS today, you can't yet. The server is plain Bun, SQLite and Markdown with nothing Apple-specific at its core, so a Linux build is on the table; it just isn't the thing built for the household I'm shipping to first.

Who's behind this

Maurice is made by one person — me. I started it as a household AI for my own family, on hardware I already owned, because I didn't want the people I live with to be the product. It's open-source and it's early: a solo project, shipped honestly, not a startup pretending to be bigger than it is. You'll find rough edges. You'll also find that nothing here mines you, upsells you, or phones home. — Candide

Solo-built · in beta · maintained in the open · candide.me