duck.ai
Hacker ApprovedRanked 10 of 26 AI assistants by recommenders
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.
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.
34 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 27
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 79%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 27 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Quick answers in place of web search
“Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.”
Comment from 27 May 2026 in “DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode” “which I really like for basic, search engine but better stuff”
Comment from 14 Jan 2026 in “Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike wants to do for AI what he did for messaging” “It makes searching faster and more targeted.”
Comment from 11 Aug 2026 in “Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse” - Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “How I use LLMs to learn complex topics”
- Comment from 27 May 2026 in “Stack Overflow's forum is dead thanks to AI”
Private by default, privacy-focused
“I pay for a subscription to Duck.ai mainly because I don't want to be constantly fighting my vendor to protect my privacy.”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?” “I love that duck.ai provides a more private way to use different smaller and medium (?) scale LLMs.”
Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo” “the main selling point is that the product is private by default”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy” - Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?”
Several models without signup
“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.”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Ask HN: How do you use LLMs for private discussions?” “for basic stuff you can always use duck.ai which also aggregates other models”
Comment from 28 Feb 2026 in “OpenAI – How to delete your account” “There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc.”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Programming Used to Be Free” Free to use
“There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc.”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Programming Used to Be Free” “with huge help of duck.ai which is completely free”
Comment from 30 Aug 2026 on Hacker News “This works well enough if you don't want to pay.”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “A friendly tour of process memory on Linux”
Other AI assistants people recommend
The four most recommended other AI assistants, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | 5,175 | 5,005 | 51% | 13 | 6 mo326 owners | — |
| Google Gemini | 2,195 | 2,236 | 50% | 13 | 6 mo98 owners | — |
| ChatGPT | 2,186 | 2,885 | 43% | 13 | 1 yr164 owners | — |
| Grok | 727 | 1,249 | 37% | 13 | 1 mo19 owners | — |
| duck.aiThis page | 27 | 7 | 79% | 12 | — | Approved |
What people said
35 of the 41 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Duck.ai is pretty good too.”
“I'll be asking for code directly in Duck.ai and then I'm extremely unlikely to need to click through”
“duck.ai wrote me a CPU in Verilog”
“privacy is their whole brand”
“I pay for a subscription to Duck.ai mainly because I don't want to be constantly fighting my vendor to protect my privacy.”
“with huge help of duck.ai which is completely free”
“It makes searching faster and more targeted.”
“it feels better than searching the web”
“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.”
“I'm skeptical of their "private" claims.”
“the only DDG thing I use anymore is their duck.ai service”
“Also toggle-able with a very visible and accessible widget that remembers your choice.”
“The DDG one is good, useful”
“Good for looking up random questions and they typically include references.”
“the DuckDuckGo AI gave me the correct answer”
“There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc.”
“the main selling point is that the product is private by default”
“for basic stuff you can always use duck.ai which also aggregates other models”
“I can easily swap the Claude app out with DuckDuckGo”
“This is not much different to the BigLabs, tbh.”
“Duck.ai stores chat history on current access device”
“Conversational voice AI (like Duck) is great for Q&A and brainstorming.”
“Tested (via duck.ai) a while ago with creating fiction stories in less than 500 characters and it came up with generics and repeats”
“Personally tried duck.ai which is good too”
“DDG's AI platform, and the passionate anti-AI people don't like anything AI adjacent which DDG is doing.”
“which I really like for basic, search engine but better stuff”
“I really love duck.ai's minimalist approach to questions when I search on duckduckgo”
“I love that duck.ai provides a more private way to use different smaller and medium (?) scale LLMs.”
“It's quite polished and smooth for an ai ux.”
“I've found duck.ai the best way to experiment with AI”
“Duck.ai is an interesting product”
“I just interacted with duck.ai, duck duck go's stab at a bot. I long for a little more conservatism.”
“This works well enough if you don't want to pay.”
“For $10/month it's great to have someone whose incentives are aligned with my own”
“I found that ChatGPT is a lot better than the "mini" models on duck.ai”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.