Products
Base Drive, private AI for the laptop you already own
A planned $19.99 USB drive, not yet orderable, that sets up private, offline AI on an Apple Silicon Mac or Windows 11 laptop. How it works, as of October 2026.
Base Drive is the first product we plan to sell. It is a USB drive that sets up private, offline AI on the laptop you already own. Our product page sums up the pitch in three short lines: "No cloud account. No API bill. No setup headache."
As of October 2026, Base Drive is labeled Coming soon. It cannot be ordered yet. Our store (opens in a new tab) lists every product as coming soon and names Base Drive as the first one to launch. Everything below describes the drive the way offlinebase.com/base-drive (opens in a new tab) describes it today. The site treats prices, specifications and model lists as current targets that may change before launch, and so do we.
One drive at $19.99, paid once
There is one version of Base Drive, with "No tiers to compare."
The price is "about what one month of a chatbot subscription costs, except you pay it once and keep the thing." After that there is no account to renew and no usage meter counting your questions. What renting AI costs when the terms change explains why owning the tool matters to us.
When ordering opens, Shopify will handle checkout. We have not announced a launch date.
Apple Silicon Macs, Windows 11 PCs, USB-C and USB-A
What | Base Drive |
|---|---|
Computers | Apple Silicon Macs and Windows 11 PCs |
Connectors | USB-C and USB-A on the same drive, so it "fits new and old ports" |
Internet | Setup and chat both work offline |
The two connectors save you an adapter. A MacBook with USB-C ports and an older Windows 11 laptop with USB-A ports can both take the same drive.
Four steps from plug-in to first answer
Our How it works (opens in a new tab) page lays out setup in four steps.
- Plug in Base Drive. Connect it to a supported Apple Silicon Mac or Windows 11 PC. The drive waits until you open the installer.
- Run one installer. Open Install Offline Base.app. The installer verifies every file, checks the computer and picks a local model that fits it.
- Open the local chat app. Ask questions, draft text or work with documents. The model and your conversations stay on the computer.
- Unplug the drive. Base Drive is needed only for setup.
The installer copies the AI onto your laptop, so the model "runs at full speed, even with the drive unplugged." The drive carries everything, and your laptop does the thinking. Once setup finishes, the installed AI keeps working with the drive in a drawer and the Wi-Fi switched off.
On a real laptop, plug-in to first answer takes a few minutes, most of it spent copying the models.
What is on the drive
The product page shows a simplified file view of the drive with six items.
Item | What it does |
|---|---|
Install Offline Base.app | The one-click installer for Mac and Windows. It copies the models across, verifies them and opens the chat app. |
models | A folder with two GGUF model files: a compact one for lighter machines and a stronger everyday one |
ui | Open WebUI, a familiar chat interface that opens in your browser and runs offline against the model on your own machine |
memory.md | A readable memory file (coming soon) |
docs | Offline guides to running, owning and trusting your local AI |
VERSION.txt | Plain text. New models and improvements arrive on a fresh drive, so "nothing updates itself behind your back." |
GGUF is the standard file format that local AI models ship in. The ui folder holds Open WebUI, the chat app the installer copies to your laptop. After setup it is a chat window in a browser tab, talking to a model that lives on your laptop.
LFM2.5 1.2B and Gemma 4 E2B
The product page lists two models for every drive: Liquid AI's LFM2.5 1.2B (opens in a new tab) as the compact model and Google's Gemma 4 E2B (opens in a new tab) as the default everyday model.
How much memory a local AI model needs covers their sizes and which laptops suit each one. More models are on the way.
memory.md and web search, both marked Coming soon
Two items on the Base Drive card carry a Coming soon tag. Both are planned additions.
- memory.md, a memory file you can open and read. The plan is a plain file on your disk that holds what your AI remembers about you. You could open it, edit it or delete it like any other file.
- Web search and cloud escalation, only with your approval. Web search would let the AI check current information online. Cloud escalation would hand a harder question to a bigger model. As designed, both stay off until you turn them on, ask before anything leaves, and name exactly what would be sent.
Base Drive answers entirely on your laptop today, with no network involved. A local-only mode is planned to keep it that way for good. When outside help does arrive, it is designed to use only United States-hosted providers under zero-data-retention terms. What zero data retention means, and where it stops explains what those terms cover.
Students, writers and anyone done renting AI
We designed Base Drive for most people. A student can get help with an outline while the Wi-Fi is off, and a writer's drafts stay on their own laptop.
The models are sized for everyday writing and questions on an ordinary laptop. They also make mistakes. Our terms warn that model output can be "confidently, fluently wrong," and that small local models are more prone to this, so check anything that matters. What a million real questions say about small local models looks at where small models do well. If you want an always-on box for a whole household or office, read about Base Router, the product we are designing next.
A USB drive you can check
The installer is open source, every file on the drive is listed, and each drive ships with published SHA-256 checksums that setup verifies before copying anything. The installer is not yet signed by Apple or Microsoft, so the first run shows an "unidentified developer" warning. Day to day, Base Drive has no account and no telemetry, and the chat app talks to the model only on localhost, inside your own machine.
How Base Drive earns the trust a USB drive needs goes through how you can check the drive yourself before you run anything on it.
Try the compact model on our Jetson today
Our Try it (opens in a new tab) page runs LFM2.5 1.2B, the drive's compact model, live on a Jetson Orin Nano Super that we operate. That hardware differs from a laptop, so treat it as a sample of how the model answers. Three things you can try on offlinebase.com without an account covers our free demos, and What Offline Base is building shows where Base Drive fits in our plans.