Make the cloud a choice. Learn to run AI yourself.

Run It Local is a free, private place for anyone learning local AI: people who are just curious, hobbyists building a home rig, families who’d rather keep their data at home, and professionals. You’ll find daily local-AI news, hardware prices we check ourselves, and the In-house weekly newsletter.

For teams, there’s a toolkit: a placement guide for deciding which AI jobs stay in-house, a readiness check and protocols for getting the knowledge behind them ready, and cost and capacity scenarios for modeling the tradeoff. It was built for People, HR, and Ops leads and founders, and it’s one part of the site, not the whole of it.

Private by design

There are no analytics, no cookies, and no third-party scripts or fonts on this site. Everything you enter is calculated in your browser and never sent. The readiness check can save your scores on your own device if you click Save, so a retake can show what changed, and you can delete them any time.

The idea

Running AI on your own machine is more possible every month, and it’s easier to start than most people think. We want to explain it plainly, without hype, so you can decide what belongs on your hardware and what doesn’t.

For teams

Most of what a company knows lives in handbooks, policies, onboarding material, SOPs, and people’s heads. A lot of it can’t, or shouldn’t, leave the building. AI that runs on your own hardware can help people find it. But it can only be as good as the knowledge you give it. Out-of-date handbooks, missing owners, and unwritten processes come straight back out as wrong answers.

So we start where the real work is: getting the knowledge ready. The check tells you where you stand. The protocols tell you what to do about it, in order. Most of the first moves cost nothing.

Where the toolkit came from

The placement guide and the cost and capacity scenarios started as a toolkit Mike built for a presentation, under the title “Does your AI need the cloud?”. They’re rebuilt here with the same questions and the same math, joined to the readiness check and protocols so the whole path fits together: place it, check it, treat it, re-check it, model it.

Why protocols

Mike Folk, who founded FolkTech AI, spent 33 years in healthcare, 16 of them as a paramedic. In the field, readiness isn’t a feeling. It’s a checked bag, a practiced drill, and a protocol you can follow at 3 a.m. Every protocol here uses that structure: indications, contraindications, equipment, procedure, checks, and handoff.

That background shapes the format. It isn’t a clinical or compliance claim, and nothing here is clinical, legal, or compliance advice.

What we believe

• The cloud is a good choice for plenty of work. The point is to choose it on purpose, job by job.
• For most company-knowledge jobs, the AI only needs your own documents. That’s why many of them fit well in-house.
• AI should answer questions and draft documents. It shouldn’t make decisions about people.
• Every statistic links to its source. If we can’t source it, we don’t print it.
• Difficulty and time estimates are honest. If something takes weeks and an IT person, we say so.
• Your check answers are yours. They never leave your browser.

Who’s behind it

Run It Local is written by Mike Folk and published by FolkTech AI, which builds local AI. That’s a commercial interest, so we disclose it. This site doesn’t sell anything, and nothing here requires a FolkTech product. Read more about who’s behind this and our editorial standards.

Help write the next protocol

If you’ve done this work inside a company, we’d like to learn from it, including what didn’t work. See Write for us.