Skales is an AI harness.

Skales is an AI harness you install like an app - on the stores it is filed as an AI agent & task app. A harness is the layer between you and the model: 286 built-in tools, approval gates, memory, planning, and the surfaces to use them, on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. The model itself is a part you swap: Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, or models running on your own hardware through Skales Local. It does real work - background goals, coding, email, calendar, browsing, media generation. Free for personal use, no account required.

Frontier model capability is close to a commodity now: several vendors sell something comparable, and the leader changes every few months. What decides whether an AI finishes your task is the harness around it - which tools it can reach, whether it asks before doing something irreversible, whether it remembers, whether it can plan and resume after a restart, and which surfaces you can reach it through. Skales is that layer, and the model plugs into it rather than the other way round.

Yes. Skales is free for personal, educational and internal business use under the Business Source License 1.1, which automatically converts to Apache 2.0 in 2030. You only pay your AI provider for API usage - or pay nothing at all by running models on your own hardware with Skales Local, Ollama or LM Studio. Skales itself never charges a subscription.

Download the installer for your OS from skales.app/download - Windows EXE, macOS DMG (signed), Linux .deb or AppImage, Android on Google Play, iOS on the App Store. Double-click, done in about 30 seconds. No Docker, no terminal, no admin rights, no account.

Yes - Skales is local-first. All conversations, memories, files and settings live in ~/.skales-data on your machine. API calls go directly from your computer to your chosen AI provider (BYOK - bring your own key). No cloud backup, no middleman, no data sharing. With Skales Local it works entirely offline: the model, the image generation and the speech all run on your machine. Memory is deliberate about what it will not keep: a value shaped like a card number, an IBAN, an API key, a token or a password is not written down at all, because a memory is read back into the prompt of every later conversation.

Yes, two ways. The Skales desktop serves its own interface, so with remote access on you can open that interface in a browser on a tablet, a second computer or a phone - one switch under Settings > Security, off by default, and turning it on means reachable over LAN or Tailscale AND token-protected as one inseparable setting, with the access URL, a QR code and a regenerate button on the same page. A browser session can additionally be asked for a six-digit code from an authenticator app, with ten recovery codes. The other way is the mobile app, paired by QR over an end-to-end encrypted relay, which is a native agent in its own right rather than a window onto the desktop.

Every conversation shows what it costs while it runs - a price beside the context meter, a price on each answer, and how much of the input came out of the provider's cache instead of being paid for twice. You can give a conversation a ceiling: at half of it and again at the ceiling Skales stops and asks whether to carry on, switch to a cheaper model or stop, and that question is answered by you rather than by the model, so being asked costs nothing. The ceiling holds for a turn typed on your phone as well, Telegram and WhatsApp count per conversation and per day, and the killswitch is still one click away.

26 providers out of the box: Skales IQ (the built-in zero-key trial), OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), xAI (Grok), DeepSeek, Mistral, Groq, Together, MiniMax, Moonshot AI (Kimi, with a switch between the international and China endpoints), GLM (z.ai), Qwen via DashScope, Hunyuan, GigaChat, AtlasCloud, Unsloth, Cloudflare Workers AI, NVIDIA NIM, Hugging Face and OpenRouter - plus local models through Skales Local, Ollama, LM Studio, KoboldCpp or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. You can even sign in with your existing ChatGPT subscription, no API key needed. Every provider card also carries a "Can this model see images?" switch - Auto, Yes or No - so a wrong guess about a model's eyes is something you can correct.

No. Skales Local ships its own inference server: Skales starts it, stops it and updates it, and a catalog of 56 models covers text, vision, speech and images - each with its size, its license and a SHA-256 you can check before it runs. Image generation happens on the device, speech comes in through Whisper and goes out through Piper, all without a key. The GPU badge is read from what the engine actually loaded rather than from what the build was capable of, so a model that ended up on the processor says so and says why. Ollama and LM Studio still work exactly as before; they are a choice now, not a prerequisite.

Yes. Iris is the voice surface and has her own place in the sidebar: the wake word runs on your device, she speaks back, and - the part that matters - she has the same full tool palette a chat turn gets, plus the skills you switched on for the chat, not a shortlist of voice commands. When something needs your permission she asks out loud and takes yes or no for an answer, while anything that sends, deletes, runs or deploys still wants your eyes on the screen. A call is the same mind in the same conversation rather than a smaller one of its own. Every chat also has plain voice in and out, with speech recognition and text-to-speech that can run entirely offline.

Yes. Skales Mobile is a real native app on the App Store and Google Play - not a web view and not a remote control that needs a computer. It runs 111 tools on the phone itself, can run a model on the device with no connection at all, and includes Flow, Studio, voice, agents and skills. Pairing it with a Skales desktop over an end-to-end encrypted relay is optional and adds that machine's full tool set - starting and stopping goals, the live plan, approving a step, reading the desktop workspace. No account, no subscription.

Type /goal and what you want. Skales plans the steps, keeps working in the background with the chat closed, runs recurring schedules, and parks with a decision card when it needs your approval. A run survives a restart: close, update or crash Skales mid-task and it comes back as an unfinished run that says how far it got, with one Continue to pick it up. Cockpit shows all of it on one execution board. Code Mode works in any folder like a coding agent, Workflows replay recorded tasks, and the Organization feature delegates work across specialized agents - with approval gates throughout.

Yes. The Windows build is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows a one-time notice. Click "More info", then "Run anyway". The published installer scan shows 0 detections across 50 antivirus engines on VirusTotal, Skales is source-available, and you can verify your download against the SHA-512 checksums published with every release. The macOS build is fully signed and notarized by Apple.

A floating mascot that lives on your screen - Skales the gecko, Bubbles or Capy, plus thousands of custom pixel pets in the open Petdex format. The Buddy is a full agent: ask it anything and it works through multi-step tasks with approve/decline buttons right in its speech bubble.

Windows 10/11 (64-bit), macOS 11 Big Sur or newer (Apple Silicon or Intel), or any x64 Linux distro (Ubuntu 20+, Fedora 36+, Debian via .deb). Skales uses about 300 MB of RAM in normal operation - no GPU required. Local models need whatever the model needs; the Skales Local catalog lists the size of each one before you download it.