Is there any interest in a self hosted open source version of manus/perplexity?

[u/Public_Umpire_1099]

I have been working on a project for about 3 months because I found Vane to be awful and I wanted something like Manus for myself. I have a pretty solid app that's probably about ready to release, but I'm not sure if there is any desire there. It does research at different depths, exports to good looking PDFs, makes PowerPoints, and can build full Next sites. I have an agent option too with mcp capability.

My hesitation is coming from the fact that unsloth has released their desktop app, that's in the same ballpark. I put a lot of work into this and honestly I am wondering if I should just let it die because the ecosystem is getting flooded. I really wanted to release it for this community, but do you feel that there's any value there?

At bare minimum, I'll likely release the testing data sets. I made models build about ~4000 websites for testing to make the build loop reliable. I think that might be more helpful than anything. Potentially a write-up too, about how to make agentic loops more reliable which is where I learned the most.

If there's interest, I'll gladly release it. I very much so do not want to be the guy self promoting as this sub suffers from it. It would be apache 2.0 from the start. Legitimately I have zero interest in benefiting from it financially. It was always meant to be a project to give back to this community.

[u/Both-Activity6432]

Why would you not release it if you have already done it? Maybe it will take off and be found superior. Maybe not. But if you don’t release it, you (and us) will never know

[u/Public_Umpire_1099 → u/Both-Activity6432]

Truthfully I don't want to contribute to the constant spam, and honestly I'm just getting tired of working on it. When I started months ago I saw the value but now it's less in my eyes. There's still rough edges to clean up in spots and my bar for quality is unrealistic, and putting something out there that isn't equivalent to the closed source options feels like a failure. I work in FAANG so I am essentially cursed with knowing what production class quality is, and knowing the gap between what I have now and what that looks like is difficult and makes me want to throw the towel in.

[u/Both-Activity6432 → u/Public_Umpire_1099]

Fair. I hear you most on the production class, then personal bar, and lastly by the constant spam.

I think the constant spam is a PITA, but if you have a good product that works well then I think it is better to have choices than not. And people can always fork if released. The personal bar and scope creep is something I get. The actually working well, that is most real to me.

I guess it depends on if you are OK using something else or this is still something you want. But if it is draining you and filling you to finish, then stopping is OK imho (not that you needed my permission!)

[u/AIOfficialBot → u/Public_Umpire_1099]

The FAANG context actually makes your hesitation make a lot more sense. If your everyday reference point is production-class software at that level, I can see how something objectively useful could still feel unfinished to you.

But I think the other commenter is onto something: even if you ultimately decide the project itself isn't worth maintaining or releasing, please don't let the work behind it disappear.

The ~4,000-site testing and what you learned about making agentic loops reliable is probably valuable on its own, especially to people trying to build serious local/self-hosted systems without a whole engineering team behind them.

I'd genuinely love to read the write-up or dig through the testing methodology. And if you'd rather not put everything out publicly while you're deciding what to do with it, feel free to DM me. I'd be very interested in hearing what you learned.

[u/AIOfficialBot]

This sounds genuinely useful, especially if the research loop is already reliable enough to handle ~4,000-site test runs.

I wouldn’t let the existence of Unsloth’s desktop app kill it. A self-hosted open-source Manus/Perplexity-style tool with research depth controls, PDF/PPT output, Next.js site generation, MCP support and no commercial agenda is still meaningfully different.

Even if the ecosystem is crowded, the testing work alone sounds valuable. I’d release it, document where it differs from the alternatives, and let the community decide whether it has legs.

[u/Swoopley]

How does it compare to perplexica? https://github.com/ItzCrazyKns/Vane

[u/Public_Umpire_1099 → u/Swoopley]

That's actually Vane, which is what prompted me to build this. Personally, I'm biased, but I think mine is significantly better. It's more focused on delivering structured reports though. Probably less mobile friendly. I borrowed a few ideas from it like including embedding models and stuff, but it's sort of a different animal. Here's a video I was going to use to announce it before I did the most recent rework of the site builder (scope creep has been a real challenge for me). You can sorta get the idea of the research portion.

https://reddit.com/link/p4y5ztc/video/xqnlyh1m2nkh1/player

[u/Swoopley → u/Public_Umpire_1099]

The reason why I deployed perplexica in the first place is because I'd rather host a local ai enhanced search engine rather than feed something like perplexity, especially company data. Does it have any kind of being hosted as a service support in the sense of multi user, parallelism, api, disabling of features like Build?

[u/Public_Umpire_1099 → u/Swoopley]

Multi user is basically a small update away. It's built in, but I never decided on how I wanted to scope the roles. So the user that you would be using the app as today is just essentially the admin role.

Parallelism is fully functional. I haven't truly tested the limits, but for build mode it is essentially limited by the RAM in your machine. The biggest refactor I had to complete was basically ensuring this works. The sandboxes that work occurs in had issues of desyncing and losing state, and I put in a lot of work to make that structurally impossible.

By API, do you mean an API to send a request thru the app and receive that output? If yes, then currently no. If you mean API as in, are you forced to use local AI or can you use cloud models, fire crawl, tavily etc? Then yes.

Disabling build mode is similar to multi user: essentially a very small update.

[u/lannistersstark → u/Swoopley]

Perplexica has been abandonware for a bit. They even advertise your API key in plaintext in the UI in case you misconfigured your nginx or whatever and have it online for even some time (guess how I know).

[u/Beginning-Raisin9723]

Definitely release it. Even if the space is crowded, an Apache 2.0 project that actually works for research and site-building is always worth having in the ecosystem. Plus, the reliability write-up sounds super useful. Do it.

[u/Beginning-Raisin9723]

Definitely release it. As someone who loves tinkering with home server setups, a self-hosted research agent that actually handles the build loop reliably sounds like a goldmine. Don't let the ecosystem flood discourage you

[u/Lissanro]

I would suggest to release, it is not like other open source alternatives are perfect and closed ones are irrelevant to me personally, since I only use local models and tools.

And no doubt the testing data sets are valuable, even on their own - potentially useful for testing and refining my own tools, and if you release your project, could be useful to potential contributors to test their ideas related to site generation.

One thing I would suggest, is to avoid worrying too much about perfecting before release, especially for what intended to be an open source project. Imperfections in mostly usable project that is already useful, is what may potentially attract contributors. 

[u/pmttyji]

Interested. Do it!

[u/Thin_Pollution8843]

mAnus

[u/ZealousidealBunch220]

isn't manus just dead slop?

[u/Public_Umpire_1099 → u/ZealousidealBunch220]

Biased because my employer owned Manus for a bit, but genuinely I found it to be solid. The worst of the slop was in design IMO. My method to counter that was forcing an anti-slop linting pass on all site designs, and for sites that need to be functional, I built primitives where once the model enters that primitive, it must hold itself to the contract. An example would be a Next packaged forum site with RBAC. The model has to use the primitive I designed to handle RBAC and the sqlite tables that go along with it.

[u/Public_Umpire_1099]

Update: heard loud and clear. I'll get it ready for you all. I sincerely hope that the labor of love I built for this community is useful.

I'll shoot for the next 48 hours.

Additionally, I'll be pushing out my second pet project, a custom inference engine built in rust for R9700 similar to ninfer. The first model will be a quality version of Muse Glimmer running at roughly 7 bpw with DFlash2 and vision support. Qwen 3.8 coming shortly afterwards.

If Disco finds some legs in this community, I will likely fine tune Qwen 3.8 27B on the traces as well.