AI assistants and search decision

WormGPT

A competent technical user can reproduce the core functionality (chat + code + images) by self-hosting existing open-source assistants and wiring them to model/image APIs; doing so trades away vendor hosting, brand, and any proprietary models or services.

Visit website

You pay

Not priced

No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.

You’d pay instead

$100one-off64 h to build

$50/mo6 h/mo upkeep

No published price to break even against.

Open-source builds that already do this

Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All WormGPT alternatives, with the arithmetic →

leon-ai/leonOpen-source personal assistant usable for self-hosted chat/agent functionalityOpen on GitHub openclaw/openclawOpen-source personal AI assistant framework supporting many platformsOpen on GitHub

What a replacement has to do

A minimal replacement serves a web chat UI that proxies user prompts to one or more LLM/image‑generation backends, persists conversation history, and returns model responses and images to the user.

What it still won’t have

The vendor's hosted infra, uptime SLAs and scaling
Any proprietary trained models or vendor-specific optimizations
Brand, discovery, and any bundled content or community
Potentially simpler UX polish, analytics, and built-in billing

What remains hard

Product polish and ongoing maintenance

Read the build prompt

First-year cost

No published price

WormGPT does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.

Money you would actually spend

Keep paying

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Subscription price × seats × 12

Build it

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AI build —APIs + hosting —

Time you would spend

—

What you would spend

Your monthly price$/moAI to build it$ onceAPIs + hosting$/mo

What we assumed

Initial buildhrsMonthly upkeephrsYour rate$/hr

The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.

Runnable build prompt

Not run yet

Build a minimal self-hosted AI chat+image assistant using Next.js for the frontend, FastAPI for the backend, Postgres for conversation storage, and Docker for deployment. Core features in scope: user session handling, streaming chat UI, proxying prompts to one configurable LLM/text API and one image-generation API, persist/retrieve conversations, simple API-key admin auth, containerized deploy scripts, logging, and unit tests for API endpoints. Explicitly out of scope: training models, paid billing integration, advanced moderation workflows, and multi-tenant SaaS billing. Include error handling, input validation, and basic end-to-end tests.

How we checked3 sources · 2/3 runs agreed · evidence score 86

How the score was reached

Build verdict base78
An open-source build was found+5
3 cited sources+3
Evidence score86

The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.

How scoring works →

Cited sources · 3

Every page the run actually retrieved.

official productWormGPT homepage
open sourceleon - open-source personal assistant
open sourceopenclaw - personal AI assistant

Integrity checks

What held up, and what did not.

! 2 of 3 runs agreed; the verdict is the majority✓ Citations limited to fetched pages! 1 moat recorded