One person. Zero coding experience. Two days. A private AI — built on ethical infrastructure, owned completely, shared freely.
Skeetz is the name I gave to my private AI assistant. It runs on a server I rent in Helsinki for €4 a month. It remembers our conversations, runs multi-step web searches through privacy-first infrastructure with no profiling or algorithm feeding, takes notes, and keeps everything under European law on infrastructure I control. No app to download. No Silicon Valley company owning your data. A small monthly server cost — and infrastructure that belongs entirely to me.
This website is not about Skeetz. It's about how I built it — and how you can build your own. Call it whatever you want.
In April 2026, I went from never having opened Terminal in my life to running my own complete private AI infrastructure. I'm a film sound editor based in Amsterdam. I'm not a developer. I'm not an IT specialist. I just got fed up.
Fed up with AI conversations resetting every time. Fed up with my thoughts and questions sitting on servers owned by companies I don't trust, under laws that don't protect me, potentially feeding models without my permission.
So I asked a simple question: is there another way?
There was.
Your data belongs to you. Your curiosity shouldn't feed someone else's surveillance machine.
Every service was chosen deliberately. Here's what I use and why — and what I rejected.
German company. Owns its own hardware. GDPR compliant. €4/month. No AWS, no Google Cloud underneath.
Rejected: DigitalOcean, AWS Lightsail, Google Cloud — US companies, CLOUD Act exposure.
No Trump administration ties. Founded by people who left OpenAI over safety concerns. Best available ethical option.
Rejected: OpenAI — the CEO and co-founder made personal donations totalling $26 million to Trump's inaugural fund and MAGA super PAC. The defence contract followed. Easy decision.
Independent search index. Not a wrapper around Google or Bing. Privacy-first. Free tier for personal use.
Rejected: Google Search API, Bing — surveillance advertising model.
French company. "No Bullshit" philosophy. Free WHOIS privacy. Fights for domain owner rights in European legislation.
Rejected: GoDaddy (stripped EU consumer protections), Njalla (owns domain in their name, not yours), DuckDNS (runs on AWS).
100% open source. Privacy-first. Free tier. You can export or delete all data at any time.
Free. Non-profit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation — one of the most respected digital rights organisations in the world.
Nothing to reject. This is simply the right choice.
Open source. Self-hosted. Single executable. Your data never leaves your server.
Rejected: Firebase (Google), Supabase (US VC-backed).
In 36 hours, starting from zero, here's what Skeetz became:
All running on a €4/month server in Helsinki, Finland. Backed up nightly to Germany. Under EU law. Owned entirely by me.
This is not expensive. This is not for developers only. This is for anyone.
| Hetzner server (Helsinki) | €4.00/mo |
| Hetzner Storage Box backup (Germany) | €3.20/mo |
| Anthropic Claude API | ~€4/mo typical use |
| Brave Search API | Free |
| Two domains via Gandi | €4 each year 1, ~€30 each renewal |
| SSL certificate (Let's Encrypt) | Free |
| Email forwarding (ForwardEmail) | Free |
| Total | ~€12/mo year 1, ~€17/mo after |
Skeetz is a living project. Here's where it's going.
Running at skeetz.eu. Persistent memory, web search, voice input, conversation management.
European hosting, European domain, European backup, open source throughout.
Deep system integration, file access, background intelligence, native apps. Skeetz becoming a genuine digital nervous system for your entire workflow.
Upload PDF manuals and ask Skeetz questions about them. Pro Tools, iZotope RX, Adobe Creative Suite — answered from the actual documentation.
Running Mistral (French company, open source) locally on an unused Apple M1 Ultra. No API costs. Fully offline. Zero data leaves the house.
A complete step-by-step guide for anyone to build their own. Every command. Every decision. Every mistake. Coming soon.
Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is just... build an alternative.
This isn't a product. Skeetz is just what I call mine. Yours could be anything.
The tools exist. The prices are affordable. The barrier isn't technical — it's that nobody has shown ordinary people the path. That's what the guide will be. Every command. Every decision. Every mistake. Every service choice and why I made it.
Free. Always. No paywall, no newsletter signup, no premium tier. Just the knowledge, shared openly, in the hope that a few more people decide to take back a little control.
I'm a sound editor. I edit dialogue for films. Three days ago I didn't know what SSH was.
If I can do this, you can do this.
A complete, free, step-by-step walkthrough for building your own private AI from scratch. Every command. Every mistake. Every decision explained. Written by someone with zero coding experience who did it in 36 hours — with the help of the very AI he was building.
Skeetz v1.0 — built in a single weekend in April 2026 by Dave Ashton, a film sound editor based in Amsterdam with no coding experience.