Signals
Managed vs self-hosted AI agents: which should you run?
An AI agent that runs your repetitive work can live in one of two places: on a server you own, or on one someone runs for you. Both are real choices. The right one depends less on the technology and more on what you want to spend your attention on.
Self-hosted: ownership, and a second job
Self-hosted agents — the open-source kind — give you everything. The weights, the logs, the keys. You can read every line and run it on a five-dollar box. The catch is that an always-on agent with access to your accounts is now your responsibility: patching, monitoring, securing, recovering. That's freedom if you enjoy it, and overhead if you don't.
Managed: the outcome without the operations
A managed agent flips the trade. You don't provision anything or watch any logs. You ask, and it produces — across text, images, audio and video. The cost is that you're trusting a provider to keep it private and well-run. The benefit is that the work actually gets done while you do something else.
A simple way to choose
- Choose self-hosted if owning the stack is the point, and ops is a pleasure not a tax.
- Choose managed if you want the result, the privacy, and none of the upkeep.
tunbru is the managed side of that line — a private, done-for-you agent OS. If that's the trade you'd make, the door is open.