Free usually means a trial, an upsell or your data as the payment. Grux OS is free in a duller way: there is no hosted component to charge for, so there is nothing to buy and no account to make. The app is $0 and MIT licensed. You pay your model provider directly, on your own account, at their prices, and nothing is proxied through anything the author runs, so there is no markup and no middleman holding a copy of your prompts. Run a local model through Ollama instead and the running cost is $0 as well. There is no telemetry, no analytics SDK and no crash reporter in the tree, and since the tree is public that is a claim you can check rather than one you have to accept.
| Item | Price | Paid to |
|---|---|---|
| The app | $0 | Nobody. MIT licensed |
| An account | Does not exist | There is nothing to sign up for |
| Model usage, hosted | Their list price | Your provider, directly |
| Model usage, local | $0 | Nobody. Ollama on your own hardware |
| Updates | $0 | No updater phoning home |
spctl -a -vv /Applications/Grux.app will say so.It was a hobby project for six months, built by one person to solve one person's problem, and it got useful enough to be worth somebody else's time. Software that reads your screen and your mail should be readable back, which is the other half of the reason it is MIT rather than a download.
There is no account to make, no email to hand over and nothing to buy, which also means there is no funnel. A star on the repository is the entire ask and the only way anyone else finds out it exists.
14 of the 39 surfaces are badged BETA because they are real and unfinished. Support is one person. There is no SLA, no roadmap you can hold anyone to, and if something breaks the remedy is an issue on the repository.