How it works

One service instead of four

Steward Host is one thing to sign up to and one bill to pay. Behind it are four jobs we take off your hands: renting and patching a server, holding the AI account and its keys, keeping encrypted backups, and doing the updates and the monitoring.

You do not open an account with any AI company, and you never handle an API key or a password for the machine. You use the assistant, and we run everything under it, with one support address to email.

Your own server, set up for you

Every customer gets their own machine, not a slice of a shared one, and not shared with anyone else. We rent it from OVHcloud on your behalf, in whichever of their regions is closest to you; every machine is built from the same template, which we keep in their French region. It arrives with the assistant installed, password logins off, and nothing running that it does not need.

You use it through the assistant, not by logging into the machine. Fewer buttons, fewer ways to break a box at three in the morning.

The host and the region rule are settled. The machine size we start people on is still to be settled before launch. [to be confirmed: the starting machine size]

The KJ assistant on it

The KJ assistant is what you actually talk to. It is installed on your server, paired with your phone, and updated for you. You never install it, configure it, or hold a key for it.

Ask the assistant how your credit is going, whether your server is up, or what a bigger machine would cost, and it tells you. It can buy you more credit and move you up a tier itself, telling you the price first. For anything else, a restart, a copy of your data, or closing your account, it is a person here who does it: email [email protected], or ask the assistant to tell you how. There is no control panel for you to learn.

The AI credit, and who holds the keys

Every request the assistant makes to an AI model is paid for from your credit. Your credit is a monthly subscription of its own: Starter A$10.00, Everyday A$25.00 or Power A$60.00 a month ex GST, added to your balance when each month's payment settles, and it never expires. It sits alongside your server subscription, which starts at A$39.00 per month ex GST for the Assistant tier, so the entry combination is A$49.00 a month ex GST. A$10.00 of assistant credit is about 70 to 140 minutes of live talk, or about 12,000 to 210,000 messages, and the larger tiers scale from that. Ask the assistant for extra credit at any time: it tells you the amount first, then charges the card you left with us for it and adds it to your balance. Nothing tops you up automatically, so no credit is ever charged to you that you did not ask for.

Live talk is provisional, from our own test turn, with the low end assuming about half of an open session is listening, thinking and setup; messages are provisional, from our own test turn, with the low end assuming about 10,000 input tokens of instructions and history plus a 500 token reply per exchange. Shown at metered cost with a 0% credit markup. Both figures are recomputed from the credit ledger as usage arrives.

We hold the accounts with the AI providers, and the keys stay with us. They never go onto your server and are never shown to you. When the assistant asks a model to do something, the words of that request leave your server for the model provider's systems. That is how the assistant works, and the Privacy note says so plainly.

Your data stays on it

Everything you put into the assistant, and everything it makes for you, lives on your own server. We do not copy it into our console or billing records. The encrypted nightly backup, described below, is the only data we hold away from your server.

What we hold is the plumbing: the machine, the keys, the billing. Those two piles do not mix. See the Privacy note.

Encrypted backups

Your server is backed up nightly and encrypted, so it can be restored if something goes wrong.

By default we hold the backup key, which is what lets us bring your box back for you. If you would rather hold the key yourself, you can. Then the key is yours and not ours, and a lost key means nobody can restore the box, not even us. We will tell you which arrangement applies to you.

Updates and monitoring

We keep the machine patched and the assistant up to date, in waves rather than all at once, so a problem shows up on a few boxes before it reaches everyone.

Every server reports disk, memory and whether the assistant is running. That is how we spot a box in trouble, and how we can tell you when yours genuinely needs more room. We watch the machine; we do not read your work.

Planned maintenance is told to you in advance where we can, usually while you are asleep. A hurried restart (a security fix, say) is told straight away rather than afterwards. The notice period is still to be set: [to be set by a lawyer: the minimum notice we promise for planned maintenance].

The machine is ours; what you own is your data.

What we can see

The two-column answer, what we can see next to what we do not look at, is on the Trust page along with access, restores and deletion.