What Brut is
Brut is a local-first, bring-your-own-key node canvas for orchestrating generative-AI providers — Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Kling, Veo, Seedance for generation; Magnific and Topaz for upscaling; OpenRouter, fal, Higgsfield and Replicate as aggregator routes when you'd rather hold one key than six — built for architectural visualization production work.
Your keys. Your machine. Zero markup. Brut never sits between you and the provider — every generation call goes straight from your computer to the provider, billed to your own account at their price.
The idea in one breath
Most AI tools are a website that holds your key, runs the model on their servers, and marks up the price. Brut inverts that:
- Bring your own key (BYOK). You paste your provider keys once; they live in your OS keychain and are used only for direct calls from your machine.
- Local-first. The app and a small engine run as two processes on your computer. Graphs, outputs and projects live on your disk (or your NAS). Nothing routes through a server anyone pays for.
- Zero markup, ever. Calls go from your machine to Google/OpenAI/Kling/etc. at their price. Brut is never in the call path.
- Never pay twice. Every node hashes its inputs — unchanged work is served from cache for free. Re-run a graph after a client note and only what actually changed costs money.
If you work under NDA, this matters: your renders never leave your machine.
How it works
Two processes, one machine:
Brut app ──HTTP──▶ Brut engine ──HTTPS, your keys──▶ the providers
the node canvas adapters + job queue (local) Gemini · OpenAI · …
The app is the node canvas you work in. The engine is a small local server that holds your keys, talks to each provider, and writes outputs to your disk. When you launch Brut, the engine serves the app to your browser at http://127.0.0.1:8723/app/ — there is no hosted version, by design.
What you can make
- Images — text-to-image, image-to-image, inpainting, composition, and multi-shot exploration (a whole contact sheet of viewpoints from one scene, with a deck of surprise cards so the takes never repeat).
- Corrections — Annotate & Correct: draw arrows and notes on a render, attach a reference, and the model applies exactly those changes; Layers paints the original back wherever the model overreached — local and free.
- Video — animate stills into clips with Kling, Veo or Seedance, with an itemized cost quote before a cent is spent.
- Whole films — the Cinema Sessions: a crew of AI agents (scenarist, art director, DoP, script supervisor) that plan a sequence from your stills, which you then shoot and cut locally with ffmpeg.
- Delivery resolution — upscale stills and clips to 4K/8K with Magnific or Topaz (or your own local Topaz Video AI, free).
- A studio companion — Marcel reads your canvas, narrates what happened, advises on models and looks, and can build graphs for you on request — on your own key, every call in the ledger.
Next steps
- Install & first run — get Brut running and sign in.
- Your first image — a three-node graph, start to finish.
- Nodes & graphs — how the canvas thinks.
- Marcel — the companion that lives beside the canvas.