Why Mosaik exists.

Why it exists

Mosaik began as a better chat window, built out of frustration with two things. The first was not being in charge. The big chat apps choose the model, write the system prompt and set the limits, and you get whatever they decided that week. The second was the side question. Ask about a term halfway through a long conversation and you either lose the thread in a new chat or clutter the one you're in.

So Mosaik puts every setting in reach, lets your instructions overrule its own, and gives side questions a window of their own. The rest followed from using it every day: web search that shows where each claim came from, tools for the maths models get wrong, and a price on every answer.

It's also free. The good desktop chat apps tend to charge for the features that make them good, and it didn't seem right that comparing models or keeping a prompt library should cost a licence. In Mosaik you bring your own key, use free models or paid ones, and the app itself costs nothing.

Chat is the start, not the whole plan. Real work often means a separate app for code, another for writing, one for pictures and one for research, and a lot of copying between them. Mosaics, further down the roadmap, is the answer to that: all four in Mosaik, and projects that keep them together. Chat came first because it's what everything else is built on.

The name

A mosaic is one picture made of many small pieces. That's how most real work looks: a quick question here, a plan there, an afternoon of writing, a week of research. Mosaik is meant to hold all of it. The coming Mosaics tab takes the idea literally: each project gets a round mosaic that fills in, tile by tile, as the work gets done.

How it looks

The app is quiet on purpose: graphite in the dark theme, white in the light one, and a single amber for anything you can click. The colour lives in the pictures. The logo is the Star Window, an eight-pointed star set in a window of oxblood, blue, green and amber glass, and the same colours fill the New Chat page and the small tiles that mark each kind of work. In the name, the star takes the place of the “o”. Text is set in Inter, with Fraunces for headings.

What we hold to

• Your computer, your data. Chats, settings and spending records stay on your machine. There's no Mosaik server that holds them.
• Any model. Bring your own OpenRouter key for hundreds of models, and switch when a better one appears.
• No surprises. You see what each answer cost and what the model did to get there. Anything that changes your files or spends your money asks first, or can be undone.
• Simple by default, deep when you want it. The defaults work for people who never open Settings. Everything is there for people who do.
• Nothing tracked. No analytics or usage statistics in the app. The site counts downloads and update checks as daily totals, with nothing about who made them.

Who makes it

Mosaik is made by one independent developer in Hungary, and it's in beta: early, used every day, and changing fast. Chat is free and stays free. Optional paid add-ons like Mosaics will come later, and that's how Mosaik will pay its way. There are no ads, and your data isn't for sale.

The community is the best place to follow along and to say what should come next. Questions and ideas are welcome at [email protected].