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
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 two models:
- DeepSeek V4 Flash — default model, best for agentic tasks
- GPT-OSS 120B — lightweight fallback
Features
- Web search — enabled by default, backed by a self-hosted SearXNG instance (no external search API or scraper key required).
- File uploads (RAG) — planned; requires an embedding model (not yet available on the current backend).
Privacy
Privacy is a core value. The current LLM backend (Ollama Cloud) is a policy-based privacy model. The roadmap is to move to TEE-protected inference (via Tinfoil), which provides architectural—not just policy—privacy guarantees.
Governance
Members govern the project through Loomio and the Open Collective. See the Charter for the cooperative's values, membership terms, and governance structure.
During the pilot phase, Nathan Schneider serves as Managing Director and has sole final discretion on decisions.
This documentation lives in a public git repository. Contributions welcome.