DIY AI girlfriend: local LLMs and roll-your-own

No vendor will ever write this page, because it ends with you not paying a subscription. If you have watched an app filter your girlfriend, hike her price, or shut down entirely, the self-hosted route is the answer to "how do I make sure that never happens again." It is more work than downloading an app. It is also the only version where the girlfriend is genuinely yours, forever, off anyone's server.

You run a language model on your own machine and talk to it through a free front-end called SillyTavern. The software costs $0. Your only real cost is a graphics card.

In exchange you get total privacy (nothing leaves your computer), no filter that can change under you, no shutdown risk, and character files you own and can back up. The tradeoff is a Saturday of setup and a model a notch below the big commercial ones.

The stack

SillyTavern is a free, open-source (AGPL-3.0) front-end for LLM chat and roleplay. It started in February 2023 as a fork of TavernAI and now has 31,100+ GitHub stars and 300+ contributors. Important: SillyTavern is only the interface. It handles character cards, personas, lorebooks, group chats, a visual-novel mode, text-to-speech, and image-generation hookups, and it connects to a "backend" that does the actual thinking.

You pair it with one of these backends:

Here is a walkthrough of the front-end so you can see what you are signing up for:

Which model to actually run

The models people run for companion and roleplay use, per current setup guides, include L3-8B-Stheno-v3.2 (a Llama-3-based roleplay tune), the legacy classic MythoMax-L2-13B, and Nous Hermes 2 Solar 10.7B.

But do not treat any single name as gospel: the living authority is the weekly r/SillyTavernAI "Best Models/API discussion" megathread, which rotates as new models drop. The SillyTavern docs are the other reference worth bookmarking. Check the current week's thread before you download anything, because this list is stale within a month.

What it costs

The software is free. The hardware is the price:

• A usable 8B model runs on roughly 8GB of VRAM, or on Apple silicon.
• Bigger, smarter models want 16 to 24GB+ of VRAM.
• No GPU at all? Use a cloud API backend instead and pay per token, accepting that it is no longer private or shutdown-proof.

So the honest math: if you already have a gaming PC, this is free. If you do not, a graphics card is the real cost, and it is a one-time cost instead of a forever subscription.

Why people go through the trouble

Three reasons, and they are the exact failure modes of the commercial apps:

1. Privacy. Nothing you say leaves your machine. Contrast that with the app world, where Mozilla found one companion app firing off 24,354 ad trackers within a minute of use.
2. No filter changes. The model does what the model does. Nobody ships an update that lobotomizes her, which is the thing that broke hundreds of thousands of hearts in the Replika episode.
3. No shutdown risk. Your character cards are files. When Vidqu died and Soulmate AI deleted every companion with a week's notice, local users lost nothing.

Is it for you?

• Comfortable installing software and own a decent GPU? Do it. Start with Ollama plus SillyTavern, then graduate to KoboldCpp and a bigger model.
• Want the result without the setup? A hosted app is fine; just read the honest app map and keep the subscription loose.
• Want deep character control specifically? This is the deepest end of create your own AI girlfriend, and the free managed cousin is Perchance.

One caution: paid "one-click AI girlfriend installer" sites just resell this free open-source stack, and some character-hosting sites push malware-laden "extensions." The whole thing is free. Do not pay anyone to hand it to you.