Skales

About Skales

Built by a designer.
Not a DevOps team.

Skales is built solo in Vienna by Mario Simic - 25 years in marketing and design, UX first, then the engineering. That order explains the product: where other agent projects ship a daemon and a README, Skales ships a double-click installer and a mascot.

The thesis hasn't moved since day one: Skales is the private AI agent you install like an app. It lives on your computer, works with any model - Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok or fully local - and does real work. Free for personal use.

A 6-year-old built a Snake game with it. A grandmother approved the setup. That range - 6 to 60+ - is the design constraint behind every feature.

The Skales gecko mascot looking puzzled - the friendly face of a private AI desktop agent built in Vienna

The road to v11

From scrapped SaaS to goal engine.

  1. Early 2025

    The false start

    Skales begins as a bloated Laravel SaaS. It gets scrapped - the cloud was the wrong place for a personal AI.

  2. v1 → v4

    The rebuild

    Rebuilt from scratch as a native desktop app in an intense solo sprint: Electron shell, local-first storage, the first skills.

  3. v5 → v7

    The agent grows up

    Autopilot meta-agent, Desktop Buddy, voice, local TTS/STT, themes, the Discover community feed - and Apple code signing.

  4. v8 → v9

    The power wave

    Studio (image, video, voice, music), Codework coding IDE, multi-agent Organizations, Agent Skills open standard, MCP servers, WordPress 2.0.

  5. v10

    The ecosystem

    Skales Mobile with E2E-encrypted pairing, AIPointer overlay, ChatGPT subscription sign-in, fal.ai video, 12 languages.

  6. v11

    The goal era

    Background Goals, Code Mode, Workflows with desktop recording, Teams, Agent Swarm, Playground, self-improving agents - and the Buddy becomes a full agent with custom pixel skins.

The full, unfiltered history lives in the changelog - shipped weekly, written honestly.

Sibling project

AIPointer ⦿

The second product from the same one-person workshop: a cursor-anchored quick-ask overlay. Hold a key or wiggle your cursor and ask about whatever is on screen - it knows your projects, saves to your todos, calendar and notes, and hands off to full chat. A free, local-first alternative to cloud cursor assistants - and it ships inside Skales.

aipointer.app ↗ Watch the demo
AIPointer overlay anchored to the mouse cursor answering a question about on-screen content, local and private

What we won't do

Principles, written down.

Local-first is architecture, not marketing

Data lives in ~/.skales-data. API calls go from your machine to your provider. There is no Skales cloud to breach.

BYOK forever

Your keys, your models, your costs. Skales will never resell tokens with a margin or lock you to one provider.

No rug pulls

BSL 1.1 converts to Apache 2.0 in 2030, automatically. What you build on Skales keeps working - and eventually becomes fully open.

Safe by default

Approval gates, file sandbox and the killswitch ship enabled. Autonomy is something you grant, not something you discover.

Press & creator kit

Writing or filming about Skales? Use these straight from the server - no permission needed, attribution appreciated: logo, light-mode screenshot, dark-mode screenshot, demo GIF, mascot lineup. One-liner: “Skales is the private AI agent you install like an app. It lives on your computer, works with any model - Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok or fully local - and does real work. Free for personal use.” Questions: request@skales.app