Hachi
Verified Oct 16, 2026 ActiveSelf-hosted plain-English search across your own videos and photos, with face grouping, indexed and queried entirely offline.
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
The site names a free and a paid build but prints no figure, and the Gumroad checkout link it points at now returns 404. The paid licence was personal, non-commercial use only. The AGPLv3 source stays free.
Use tool ↗About Hachi
Hachi indexes a local folder of videos and images and lets you search it by describing what you are looking for in ordinary language; it also groups people by face. Nothing is uploaded — it installs as a self-hosted web app on x86_64 hardware, so the media stays on the machine that indexed it. RamanLabs publishes the source on GitHub under AGPLv3 (repository created March 2023, still receiving commits into late 2025) and sold a paid build adding video search, face recognition, unlimited indexing and a year of updates through Gumroad. The free build covers image search and community support only.
- Platforms
- Web
- API
- Not confirmed
- Last verified
- Oct 16, 2026
Verified sources
- Product page still lists a free and a paid version with no price, links 'Buy @ Gumroad' to ramanlabs.gumroad.com/l/gslep, and carries '© 2022 RamanLabs' (15 October 2026)ramanlabs.in ↗
- The Gumroad listing for the paid build returns 404 (15 October 2026)ramanlabs.gumroad.com ↗
- GitHub ramanlabs-in/hachi now redirects to eagledot/hachi: AGPL-3.0, release v1.4 from 3 November 2025, last push 9 December 2025, README lists images with documents as work in progress (15 October 2026)github.com ↗
Is Hachi legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Sep 18, 2019 (7 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar GoDaddy, looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Dec 16, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 16, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 16, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2023The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- RamanLabsOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of Hachi
A genuinely private alternative to cloud photo search: the index and the queries never leave your machine, and the code is auditable under AGPLv3. The trade-off is that you are the sysadmin — x86_64 hardware, a local install, no mobile client, no hosted fallback. The commercial side looks half-abandoned even though the code is not.
Pros
- Natural-language queries run across both video and image indexes locally
- Face recognition groups people across the indexed library
- Source is published on GitHub under AGPLv3 and was still being committed to in December 2025
- Runs fully offline, so no media or query text leaves the machine
Cons
- Requires x86_64 hardware and a manual self-host; there is no hosted option
- The Gumroad link for the paid build 404s, so the commercial tier is effectively unavailable
- The marketing page still carries a 2022 copyright and names no legal entity or country
Best for
- People with large local video and photo archives who refuse to upload them
- Homelab and NAS owners comfortable running a self-hosted service
- Anyone who wants face grouping without a cloud provider holding the faces
Not for
- Users who want a phone app or a hosted account with nothing to install
- Teams needing shared, multi-user access with permissions
Watch out: The free build is image-search only — video search, face recognition and unlimited indexing all sat behind the paid licence whose storefront is now dead.
Alternatives to Hachi
Hachi head-to-head
Side-by-side fact sheets against the competitors our research or their makers name — pricing, platforms, API and both verdicts on one page.