FAQ
Answers to the objections people actually raise before trying this.
Why not just use cloud AI and a bunch of SaaS apps?
Because none of them see the whole picture. A cloud chat assistant doesn't know what's in your notes vault or your bank alerts unless you paste it in by hand, every time. A budgeting app doesn't know about the note you wrote last week. Each one is a separate subscription, a separate account, and a separate place your data lives — and a provider can change or degrade the product under you at any point.
Existential's agent sits behind one local endpoint
with your files already in reach — OpenViking indexes workspace/, so
anything you write down is something it can already read and cite, no upload step required — and
Honcho gives it memory of you across sessions, not just within one. It runs on
your hardware, with your data, and no subscription.
Isn't this too complex to set up?
The plumbing — hostnames, TLS, storage tiers, secrets, backups, logging, the automation engine —
is solved once, for everything, not once per app. Setting it up is mostly
answering ./existential.sh quest and flipping a true/false flag per service. Turning on an
automation is usually a line of prompt in a cron file's frontmatter, not writing code — see
the four knobs.
Does this only help homelab nerds?
The flows are chores, not infrastructure: a bank alert email becomes a budget entry without you opening an app; a stray idea in your notes gets triaged and researched, coming back with only the questions you actually have to answer; a photograph of something becomes searchable text. None of that requires knowing what a Docker container is to benefit from — that part is what Existential handles for you.
What if I don't have a GPU?
Set the GPU vendor to external during setup and point EXIST_OLLAMA_URL at another machine
that has one, or use the CPU-only model tier. See
the hardware questions.
Do I have to turn everything on?
No — every service is a flag, and disabled services render nothing and cost nothing. The
quest picker offers Core (files, house, agent, memory, voice, monitoring) as one yes/no, or
you can go service by service. See Enable/Disable Services.
What happens to my data if I stop using Existential?
It was never anywhere else. Everything lives as plain files on disks you own — readable, copyable, and greppable with Existential not running at all.
Is this finished, or actively changing?
Actively changing — it's a curated stack, not a frozen product, and services get added, replaced, or moved to the graveyard when something better comes along. The flows documented here are the ones that ship and run today; nothing on this site is aspirational.