Yes: Grux AI is a free AI assistant for Mac with no sign up and no subscription, because there is no server to sign up to and nothing to sell. Free usually means a trial, an upsell or your data as the payment. Grux AI 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 | Nobody. Once a day Grux asks GitHub's public release page for the newest version, sends nothing about you, and installs nothing itself |
spctl -a -vv /Applications/Grux.app will say so.Grux AI became useful enough to be worth other people's time, and software that reads your screen and your mail should be readable back, which is why it is MIT licensed rather than a closed 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 how other people find out it exists.
12 of the 37 features sit in Labs because they are real and unfinished. Support is best effort, through issues on the repository: there is no SLA and no roadmap you can hold anyone to, and if something breaks, the remedy is an issue.
| Claim | Source |
|---|---|
| The app is $0 and MIT licensed; no hosted component, nothing to buy | README, What it costs |
| The dependency graph has three direct entries | README, Requirements |
| The binary is signed with a Developer ID, notarized by Apple and stapled | README, Install |
| 12 of the 37 features sit in Labs because they are real and unfinished | README, Feature tiers |
| It is MIT because software that reads your screen and your mail should be readable back | README, Who builds Grux |