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boreal.chat — Fast, Offline-First, and Open AI Conversations

Published on Jul 20, 2025

Why I built boreal.chat

Most AI chat apps felt… wrong. They were slow, limited, and trapped behind their own ecosystems — your conversations couldn’t move between devices, responses were cut short, and you couldn’t use models outside that company’s offerings.

So I built boreal.chat: a fast, offline-first, and open platform that gives users full control over their conversations and models.

What started as a weekend experiment to unify GPT, Claude, and Gemini into one clean interface quickly grew into a full offline-first system with instant syncing, blazing-fast local search, and open-source transparency.

Boreal chat explanation

How it’s built

boreal.chat runs on a local-first architecture powered by ElectricSQL and pglite. Every device maintains its own PostgreSQL-compatible database, performs full-text search locally, and synchronizes automatically when back online.

This makes it nasty fast — responses, chat loads, and searches are all instant because they happen directly on your machine.

The app is built with TypeScript and Svelte, and uses a Postgres + Electric backend for syncing. This setup ensures real-time consistency across devices while keeping your data local and encrypted by default.

Even if the server disappears, your conversations stay yours.

Boreal chat input explanation Boreal chat chats features

What’s next — v2 and decentralization

While building boreal.chat, I realized something important:

I don’t want to store anyone’s chats. Not even encrypted.

So the next version, v2.boreal.chat, is being rebuilt as a decentralized, peer-to-peer chat client where users can connect directly, encrypt end-to-end, and use any AI model they choose — including their own.

No cloud, no lock-in, no waiting for the internet to come back.

Impact

  • 🚀 Hundreds of daily users across the open-source project.
  • 🧠 Integrated support for GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini models.
  • ⚡️ Sub-100 ms chat loading from local FTS queries.
  • 🗂 Seamless sync between desktop and mobile using ElectricSQL.
  • 💬 Voice mode for natural, real-time conversations.

Check it out on GitHub → wosherco/boreal.chat