Inference Cooperative
Private AI, governed together.
The Inference Cooperative is a member-governed project providing private AI inference. We are fiscally sponsored by Metagov, a nonprofit, and funded through our Open Collective.
- Website: https://inference.coop
- AI Chat: https://chat.inference.coop
- Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/inference-cooperative
- Contact: info@inference.coop
The model
The Inference Cooperative is a member-governed AI inference utility. Members contribute on a sliding scale (currently $10–20/month) and, in return, get access to private AI inference through a shared, cooperatively governed infrastructure.
Because we are legally under a nonprofit—Metagov is our fiscal sponsor—we are member-governed rather than member-owned: members direct the project through governance, while the nonprofit holds the legal and financial structure.
Membership
- Sliding scale dues: $10–20/month
- Access: private AI inference through the cooperative's gateway
- Governance: members participate in decisions about models, priorities, and direction
Important: your email address on Open Collective and on Cloudron must match. Membership is verified by matching the email you use to contribute on Open Collective against the email you use to log in. If they differ, you won't be recognized as a member. (Guest contributors — those who contribute without an Open Collective account — are recognized by the email they entered at checkout.)
The stack
The Inference Cooperative runs a self-hosted stack on Cloudron, with all inference routed through a single gateway to cloud-based LLM providers.
Components
| Component | Purpose | URL |
|---|---|---|
| Open WebUI | Member-facing chat interface (with web search) | chat.inference.coop |
| LiteLLM | AI gateway — keys, metering, model routing | gateway.inference.coop |
| Member Portal | Membership middleware — onboarding, key provisioning, Loomio sync | portal.inference.coop |
| SearXNG | Self-hosted web search (feeds the chat's search tool) | search.inference.coop |
| Gitea | Git hosting (code + docs) | git.inference.coop |
| Loomio | Member governance | forum.inference.coop |
| Open Collective | Membership billing + fiscal sponsorship | opencollective.com/inference-cooperative |
The cooperative's software is open source and lives in the code organization on our Gitea instance.
Models
The gateway currently exposes three models (all served through Tinfoil's TEE-protected enclaves):
- DeepSeek V4 Flash — default model, best for agentic tasks (1M context, tool calling)
- GPT-OSS 120B — lightweight fallback
- GLM-5.3 Flash — fast, efficient MoE model
Features
- Web search — enabled by default, backed by a self-hosted SearXNG instance (no external search API or scraper key required).
- File uploads (RAG) — works out of the box via Open WebUI's bundled local embedding model (
sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2), no external embedding API.
Privacy
Privacy is a core value. Inference now runs through Tinfoil, which provides architectural privacy: models run inside hardware enclaves (TEEs), and request/response bodies are encrypted end-to-end with the Encrypted HTTP Body Protocol (EHBP), so even Tinfoil's own infrastructure cannot read them. This is verifiable via remote attestation — not just a policy promise.
Because Tinfoil requires EHBP-encrypted request bodies (it rejects plaintext with 426 EHBP_REQUIRED), the LiteLLM gateway routes through a local Tinfoil proxy sidecar, which verifies the enclave attestation and handles the encryption. LiteLLM talks plaintext OpenAI to the proxy; the proxy encrypts and forwards to the enclave.
Governance
Members govern the project through Loomio and the Open Collective. See the Charter for the cooperative's values, membership terms, and governance structure, and Open Questions for the decisions currently open for member discussion.
During the pilot phase, Nathan Schneider serves as Managing Director and has sole final discretion on decisions.
Legal
- Terms of Service — the agreement between the cooperative and its members about the service.
- Privacy Policy — how we handle your data, including what we can and can't see.
By creating your account, you agree to these terms.
This documentation lives in a public git repository. Contributions welcome.