status: active
timestamp: 2026-06-20
tags: [ai, llm, browser, primary]
Puter.js
Browser-side AI inference — user-pays, free unlimited from our side
Puter.js
Role
The AI chat in oriz-me and any other client-side AI feature.
Puter handles auth + billing on the user side, so the family pays
nothing per request.
Free tier
- Unlimited from our side
- Users sign in with Puter and bring their own quota / pay-as-you-go
- No backend server needed
Card / subscription required?
NO — not from us. End users may attach a card to their Puter account at their discretion; we never see it.
Why not OpenRouter directly?
Older notes in the codebase mention OpenRouter alongside Puter.js. That is a model-ID parity observation, not a direction to call OpenRouter. Puter.js exposes model IDs that mirror OpenRouter’s catalog (DeepSeek R1, Llama, Moonshot, etc.), so a Puter.js call may look like an OpenRouter call — but billing and quota route through Puter.js’s user-pays free tier, which is exactly why we picked it.
Calling OpenRouter directly would require:
- An account + eventual credit attachment.
- A server to hold the API key (we run no servers we don’t have to).
- Per-model rate-limit tracking on free routes.
Puter.js sidesteps all three. See
services/business/ai/openrouter.md (status: rejected) for
the long-form rationale.
Alternatives
- OpenRouter — REJECTED, model-ID parity only
- Pollinations.AI (no auth)
- Mediaworkbench (100K free words)
Swap cost
Medium — Puter’s API shape is its own. Swap means re-wiring the chat client to OpenRouter (server-paid) or another browser SDK.
Why this is our pick
Lets us ship AI features without paying for inference. Browser-only
keeps the no-server-needed property. Already in oriz-me.
Browser surface only — server side uses Workers AI
Puter.js is the browser-side AI provider. Server-side AI calls
(inside the Hono Worker at api.oriz.in) go through
Cloudflare Workers AI instead — native
Worker binding, zero-egress, 10K neurons / day free, no card. The
two services are not interchangeable: Puter.js needs the browser to
host its auth flow; Workers AI binds at deploy time to a Worker.
Split locked at
decisions/architecture/ai-puter-plus-cf-workers-ai.md.
Cross-refs
- Cloudflare Workers AI — server-side sibling
- AI split decision
- OpenRouter
- oriz-me design brief