| I'm talking about the LLM (and any other infrastructure involved). Reasons are: - Pricing. If I grow to do this at scale, I don't want to be paying per-action, per-month, per-token, etc. - Privacy. I don't want my data, screenshots, whatever being sent to you or the cloud AI providers. - Control. I don't want to be vulnerable to you or other third parties going bankrupt, arbitrarily deciding to kill the product or it's dependencies, or restructuring plans/pricing/etc. I also want to be able to keep my day to day operations running even if there's a major cloud outage (that's one reason we're still using this "old fashioned", non-cloud software in the first place). I think I'm simply not your target market. I advise several companies who could be (they run "legacy" software with vast teams of human operators whose daily tasks include some portion of work that would be a good candidate for increased automation), but most of them are in a space where one or more of the above factors would be potential deal breakers. The retention agreements between you and your vendors are great (I mean that sincerely), but I'm not party to them so they don't do anything for me. If you offered a contractual agreement with some teeth in it (eg. underwritten or bond-backed to the tune of several digits, committing to specific security-related measures that are audited, with a tacit acknowledgement any proven breach of contract in and of itself constitutes damages) it could go a long way to address the privacy issues. In terms of pricing it feels like the core of your product is an outside vendor's computer-operating AI model, and you've written a prompt wrapper and plumbing around it that ferries screenshots and directives back and forth. This could be totally awesome for a small scale customer that wants to dip their toes into AI automation and try it out as a turnkey solution. But the moat doesn't seem very big, and I'd need to be convinced it's a really slick solution in order to favour that route instead of rolling my own wrapper. Please don't take this the wrong way, it's just one datapoint of feedback and I do wish you luck with your venture. |
Self hosting is inevitably a part of our roadmap. Cyberdesk will have a future where we host our entire agentic framework on your own servers. AI models and the whole backend included.
I can totally see myself having the same preferences as you if I were you with regards to cost, privacy, and control.
The unique value in Cyberdesk lies beyond being a wrapper around a computer use AI model. Our intelligence caching is built on large evals that help us produce prompts that are highly reliable for the intelligent caching to work well in the first place. On top of that there are several tools that allow the agent to be useful (import/export files, failsafes, taking actions using data that was read during the same run). Rebuilding Cyberdesk, while possible, will require several weeks at the very least of very rapid iteration. So for a dev team that wants to build the best computer use agent in the world, I guess that's doable. But for a team trying to be the best "X" in their particular industry, it's probably going to be a time sink that will take away from their ability to compete well in their space, hence why Cyberdesk is a great choice for them.
I hope you keep an eye on what we're doing! I really like your insights here and I'm curious to see what you think as we evolve over the next months and years. Maybe when we do full self hosting you'll be a customer :)