Use commercially
Ship Guaardvark inside your own products, services, or client work. No royalties, no commercial license tier.
Pricing
Free. Forever. MIT Licensed.
No subscription. No per-seat fees. No paywalled features. Guaardvark is free to download, free to use, free to fork, and free to ship in your own products. Your only cost is the hardware you choose to run it on.
Maximally permissive. Use it however you want.
Modify freely
Fork it, patch it, rebrand it, integrate it. Submit upstream PRs if you want — or don't, that's allowed too.
No copyleft
Your modifications stay yours. MIT doesn't require you to release source for derivative works.
No telemetry, no tracking
Guaardvark doesn't phone home. The license guarantees you can verify that — the source is yours to inspect.
Just the hardware.
You don't pay Guaardvark — you pay for the GPU, RAM, and storage that run the models you choose. Sample tiers below.
| Tier | Hardware | What you can run | Approx. one-time cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo / hobby | 16GB RAM, no GPU (or 8GB VRAM) | Small LLMs (3B–7B), basic RAG, light image gen | $0 (existing PC) – $1,500 |
| Power user | 32GB RAM, RTX 4070/4080/4090 | Mid LLMs (13B–30B), full RAG, image gen, voice | $2,500 – $4,500 |
| Workstation | 64–128GB RAM, RTX 4090 / 5090 | Large LLMs (70B), Wan2.2 video, multi-agent swarm | $5,000 – $8,000 |
| Lab | 128GB+ RAM, dual 4090 / H100 | All of the above, parallel workloads, batch video | $10,000+ |
Guaardvark also runs (with reduced capability) on Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM. See the Raspberry Pi use case.
The license, in one paragraph
Copyright (c) 2026 Albenze AI Solutions. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the inclusion of the copyright notice and license text. The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind.
Pricing questions, answered.
Will Guaardvark ever go paid?
No. The MIT-licensed core stays free forever. If Albenze ever offers commercial services around Guaardvark (managed hosting, support, custom development), those are separate offerings that don't affect the free, open core.
Do I have to pay for Ollama, ComfyUI, or other dependencies?
No. Every dependency Guaardvark uses is open-source and free. Ollama, ComfyUI, LlamaIndex, Whisper.cpp, Piper TTS, Diffusers — all free.
Can I sell products built with Guaardvark?
Yes. MIT explicitly permits commercial use, including bundling Guaardvark inside paid products. Just keep the copyright notice in your distribution.
What's the cheapest hardware that actually runs it?
A modern laptop with 16GB of RAM runs the chat, agents, RAG, and small image generation. For video generation and large LLMs, you need a discrete GPU. See Install for full requirements.
Is hosting cost included anywhere?
There is no hosting. Guaardvark runs on your machine. The website itself is served from a small Google Cloud VM but that's just for marketing; the platform you install runs locally.