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Borrowed Recipe

A pocket assistant that lives in your own Cloudflare account

⁠ · ~5 min read

A personal assistant that pays rent to nobody. Talorys keeps your chats, tasks, notes and reminders inside your own Cloudflare account, so your stuff stays yours and no monthly subscription is needed to get started.

A tip of the chef’s hat to Roc Yu for building it and sharing it with the world, plus a builder version.

🧾 What’s cooking

  • Why: in their comment on the Hacker News post, they say they wanted a personal assistant they could own and control, without a monthly subscription or someone else’s hosted service.
  • The dish: a web app on Cloudflare Pages, a private Worker, and one Durable Object that keeps everything in SQLite and wakes up on alarms for reminders. Chat runs on Workers AI.
  • On the menu, per the README: chat with memory you can view and edit, tasks, notes and projects, one-time and recurring reminders, daily digests, optional AI routines, and push notifications.
  • Secret ingredient: the agent Worker has no public URL. The browser only talks to the Pages site, which passes /api calls to the Worker over a service binding. Cloudflare’s docs describe service bindings as the way a Pages Function calls a Worker (Cloudflare docs: Pages Functions bindings).

🍳 Difficulty · ⏱️ Prep time

One command Builder
Difficulty 🟡 Comfortable with a terminal 🟠 Node + Wrangler
Prep About 20 minutes About an hour

🛒 Ingredients

  • A Cloudflare account. Talorys is designed to fit the Workers Free plan, per the README. Workers AI and SQLite-backed Durable Objects are both available on Workers Free (Cloudflare docs: Workers AI pricing, Cloudflare docs: Durable Objects pricing).
  • Node.js 22 or newer on your computer, as the README asks.
  • A strong owner password, since you’re the only account.
  • Builder: git, and an hour to poke around the code.

👩‍🍳 Method A: one command

  1. In a terminal, run npx create-talorys@latest.
  2. Per the README, the installer checks Node, uses its bundled Wrangler, and opens Cloudflare’s sign-in page. Wrangler’s login is an OAuth flow that opens your browser by default (Cloudflare docs: Wrangler commands).
  3. Pick the account, name your agent, and set the owner password. The README says it’s hashed on your machine and stored only as a Cloudflare secret.
  4. It deploys the Worker and the Pages site, checks the live deploy, and prints your pages.dev URL (README).
  5. Open the URL, sign in, and give it a first job, like the README’s own example below.
  6. Stopped halfway? Run the same command again in the same folder; the README says it picks up where it left off.
  7. Keep the talorys/ folder it writes. You’ll need it for update, status, doctor and reset-password (README).
Add a task to review my project tomorrow

👩‍🍳 Method B: builder

  1. Clone the repo, then npm install and npm run dev. Per the README, that runs the Worker, the Pages proxy and the UI locally with a mock AI, so no Cloudflare login is needed.
  2. Reminders ride on Durable Object alarms. The Agents SDK’s scheduler uses those alarms, saves tasks in SQLite, and takes a delay, a date or a cron string (Cloudflare docs: Agents schedule tasks).
  3. The chat model is @cf/zai-org/glm-4.7-flash. Cloudflare lists it with function calling, reasoning and a 131,072-token context window (Cloudflare docs: glm-4.7-flash).
  4. Tune the guardrails in Settings → AI: output and context caps, tool-call limits, AI requests per day, and scheduled AI runs per day (README).
  5. Prefer an API token to browser login? The README lists the exact permissions it needs.

😋 Taste test

  • The installer’s own check covers the frontend, sign-in, rejection of signed-out requests, and storage, without running any AI (README).
  • Set a reminder a couple of minutes out and watch it land in the notification center. Ask it to remember something, then find it under Memory.
  • Something off? npx create-talorys@latest doctor checks the install (README).

🔥 Watch the stove

  • Daily AI allowance: Workers AI includes 10,000 Neurons a day. Going past that needs Workers Paid, which bills the extra (Cloudflare docs: Workers AI pricing). Per the README, when the allowance runs out, chat waits for the daily reset while tasks, notes and reminders keep working.
  • Other Free plan caps apply too: 100,000 Worker requests a day (Cloudflare docs: Workers limits), plus daily Durable Object request and duration caps (Cloudflare docs: Durable Objects pricing).
  • "Your own cloud" means your Cloudflare account, not your own hardware; much of the Hacker News thread debated whether it counts as "self-hosted". The README notes Cloudflare processes your data, including running Workers AI on your messages and the memories sent with them.
  • One owner only: no signups, accounts or teams, by design (README).
  • On iPhone and iPad, add it to the Home Screen before turning on push notifications (README).
  • Back up now and then: Settings → Privacy → Download backup (README).

📎 Where this came from