What Brut is

Brut is a local-first, bring-your-own-key node canvas for orchestrating generative-AI providers: Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic (text), Kling, Veo, Seedance and Seedream (BytePlus), Black Forest Labs (FLUX) and Ideogram for generation; Magnific and Topaz for upscaling; OpenRouter, fal and Replicate as aggregator routes when you'd rather hold one key than six.

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.

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. Brut runs entirely 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 remembers what it was given: if nothing changed, the last result is reused 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 go only to the provider you pick, on your key — never to us.

#How it works

Brut runs entirely on your machine. A small local engine holds your keys, talks to each provider directly and writes every output to your disk. There is no Brut server in between and 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.
• Compose by hand first — the Sketchpad: brush strokes and wired images as movable layers on one canvas, flattened locally into the image you generate from. 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 render as clips and edit together on your machine (the edit is free).
• Delivery resolution — upscale stills and clips to 4K/8K with Magnific or Topaz (or your own local Topaz Video AI, free).
• Ready-made workflows — a shipped bank of pre-wired chains for the recurring jobs (clay to photoreal, day to dusk, populate, weather, an editorial sheet, a hero still to a clip, and more): each drops as one card with knobs, on named models, from the home screen or the library. See Workflows.
• 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.