BYOAIK — Bring Your Own AI Key: a directory of AI tools that run on your own API key.

Local Deep Research

Local-first agentic deep-research assistant that produces cited reports across web, academic, and private sources.

Website Source code

Category:

Research Tools

Pricing:

Open Source

Open source:

Yes (MIT)

Self-hostable:

Yes

Local-first:

Yes

Platforms:

Web, Self-hosted, CLI, Library/SDK, Docker

AI providers (bring your own key):

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama, Custom / OpenAI-compatible

API key storage:

Configured by environment variable

Key risk level:

LOW

Trust score:

86/100

Local Deep Research (LDR) is an open-source, self-hosted AI research assistant that runs autonomous multi-step "deep research" over many sources (web via SearXNG/Tavily/SerpAPI/Brave, academic via arXiv/PubMed/Semantic Scholar, Wikipedia, and your own private documents through LangChain retrievers), then synthesizes findings into reports with inline citations. It is designed to run entirely locally and encrypted, but supports a wide range of LLM backends. Users bring their own API keys for cloud LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, OpenRouter's 100+ models, plus any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoint) and for premium search providers; local models via Ollama, LM Studio, and llama.cpp incur no cost. Keys are configured either through environment variables (e.g. LDR_LLM_OPENAI_API_KEY, LDR_LLM_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY) or directly in the web Settings UI (Settings -> LLM Provider -> select provider and enter credentials). It ships a web UI (localhost:5000), Docker images with GPU support, a CLI, a Python client library plus HTTP REST API, and an MCP server for Claude Desktop/Code integration. v1.7.0 (June 2026) added an interactive multi-turn Chat Mode with live citation streaming.

How your API key is handled

Your API key is supplied via an environment variable or local config file. Requests are sent directly to the AI provider. Because it can be self-hosted, your key never has to touch a third-party backend.

Setup

Install the tool, set your provider API key as an environment variable (or in its config file), and pick a model.