# duck.ai

27 Hacker News commenters recommended duck.ai and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Gives private, no-signup access to several AI chat models, with privacy as the main draw. Critics doubt its privacy claims and find the smaller models weaker than ChatGPT.

## Why people recommend it

- Quick answers in place of web search (5 comments): "Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297836)) "which I really like for basic, search engine but better stuff" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614225)) "It makes searching faster and more targeted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49258659))
- Private by default, privacy-focused (4 comments): "I pay for a subscription to Duck.ai mainly because I don't want to be constantly fighting my vendor to protect my privacy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49539562)) "I love that duck.ai provides a more private way to use different smaller and medium (?) scale LLMs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260716)) "the main selling point is that the product is private by default" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523493))
- Several models without signup (3 comments): "It doesn't require any signup and let you use gpt-5.4 nano/mini, Haiku 4.5, Mistral Small 4 and Gemma 4 31B." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48891202)) "for basic stuff you can always use duck.ai which also aggregates other models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193743)) "There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47749459))
- Free to use (3 comments): "There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47749459)) "with huge help of duck.ai which is completely free" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497471)) "This works well enough if you don't want to pay." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45909007))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude.md): 5175 recommend
- [Google Gemini](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini.md): 2195 recommend
- [ChatGPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chatgpt.md): 2186 recommend
- [Grok](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grok.md): 727 recommend
- [Microsoft Copilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-copilot.md): 139 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://duck.ai/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "duck.ai", https://hackerapproved.com/p/duck-ai/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).