Off Grid
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 13 of 27 local LLM runners by recommenders
Free, MIT-licensed app that runs AI models offline on phones and laptops, valued for privacy and easy setup. Caveat: image generation sometimes needs network access.
Free, MIT-licensed app that runs AI models offline on phones and laptops, valued for privacy and easy setup. Caveat: image generation sometimes needs network access.
21 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 71%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 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
Runs fully offline with no cloud
“Just downloaded it and wow—this is the future. It's incredible to have this much power fully offline.”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” “No internet or cloud needed. Amazing work”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: Run AI chat, image gen, vision, and voice offline on your Mac” “runs open models on the desktop/laptop you already have and picks ones that fit its memory, free and offline”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem” Privacy is the main draw
“The privacy angle is the real killer feature here IMO.”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” “Real speed and privacy wins if Pixel 9 pushed true offline AI like this instead.”
Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid: On-device AI-web browsing, tools vision,image,voice–3x faster” Easy to set up
“The app is basically just a wrapper that makes it super easy to set this up”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” “Getting it setup was easy.”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” Free and MIT-licensed open source
“The whole thing is MIT licensed - happy to answer anything about the architecture.”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Qwen 3.5 running on a $300 Android phone – on-device, open source” “runs open models on the desktop/laptop you already have and picks ones that fit its memory, free and offline”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Errors and bugs on some Android phones
“something went wrong doing NPU image generation on my phone”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” “It loops with an error message needing access to DSP ?”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” “I can confirm this bug on a Samsung S24 Ultra.”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” Image generation weak or needs network
“The Apps works fine for text generation, but not for image generation: it needs network access”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone” “I find the image generation models rather lacking.”
Comment from 31 May 2026 in “1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices”
Other local LLM runners people recommend
The four most recommended other local LLM runners, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| llama.cpp | 471 | 109 | 81% | 13 | 1 yr4 owners | Approved |
| Ollama | 350 | 247 | 59% | 12 | 1.5 yrs8 owners | — |
| LM Studio | 217 | 74 | 75% | 12 | 3 yrs4 owners | Approved |
| DS4 by antirez | 109 | 20 | 84% | 7 | 1 mo3 owners | Approved |
| Off GridThis page | 15 | 6 | 71% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
30 of the 32 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“runs open models on the desktop/laptop you already have and picks ones that fit its memory, free and offline”
“Thanks for making life simpler and easy.”
“No internet or cloud needed. Amazing work”
“I find the image generation models rather lacking.”
“it looks like the fakest, ai sloppiest site i've seen, together with reviews that don't seem real”
“Domain-specific training helps a lot.”
“The whole thing is MIT licensed - happy to answer anything about the architecture.”
“Real speed and privacy wins if Pixel 9 pushed true offline AI like this instead.”
“added support for web search, tool calling and KV cache optimization support”
“it's been an amazing journey”
“It loops with an error message needing access to DSP ?”
“The Apps works fine for text generation, but not for image generation: it needs network access”
“the image generation claim is more reasonable than it sounds”
“I can confirm that the issue is resolved on the Samsung S24 Ultra.”
“Wild how bad it is compared to”
“I like it, I have a couple minor things (android)”
“something went wrong doing NPU image generation on my phone”
“Just downloaded it and wow—this is the future. It's incredible to have this much power fully offline.”
“tried this on pixel 9, interesting stuff”
“It'll handle everything like vision, and attachments too.”
“IMO you don't need claude level performance for a lot of day to day tasks.”
“The app is basically just a wrapper that makes it super easy to set this up”
“Looks like the build requirements for SDK and NDK in the build instructions don't match the build.gradle.”
“There are basically no useful models that run on phone hardware.”
“The privacy angle is the real killer feature here IMO.”
“I can confirm this bug on a Samsung S24 Ultra.”
“Getting it setup was easy.”
“it doesn't move the screen up to make room for the keyboard”
“It looks very well thought out, the UI is nice.”
“Very nice, but I'm gonna wait for the f-droid build.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.