Chatting with an AI in the cloud is easy. The hard part is owning it — your data, your access, your agent — so no one else can throttle it, mine it, or switch it off. That's what the box is for. Six reasons it beats a chatbot you only rent.
Your data lives on the box, not our servers
Your conversations, the agent's memory, and the skills it learns all sit on the box on your desk — in ~/.hermes/, on hardware you own. We don't keep a copy on our servers, and we can't read what's on your box. A cloud chatbot is the opposite: your chat history and memory live on someone else's machines and feed someone else's roadmap. See what MangoTart is for the full picture.
No shared account to get banned
Cloud AI access is full of resold logins, shared API pools, and proxy "mirrors" — and the moment a provider flags one, everyone riding it goes dark at once. MangoTart connects your own account the official way: your existing ChatGPT subscription through OpenAI's own login (the same path Codex uses), or your own API key. There's no middleman account between you and the model to suspend, throttle, or nuke.
A box can break. Your agent doesn't have to.
Every night the box makes an encrypted backup of everything — memory, skills, settings, chat history — and stores it in the cloud. The twist: it's encrypted on the box before it leaves, so all we ever hold is ciphertext we can't open. If your box is ever lost or damaged, get a new one, restore the backup, and your agent picks up right where it left off.
Keep your backup password
The backup password lives only on your box and with you — never on our servers, and we can never read it back. If you lose it, the backup can't be recovered, by us or anyone. Save it somewhere safe. (Logins inside the box's browser aren't part of the backup — you'll just sign back into those on the new box.)
It keeps working even if we don't
The agent on the box is Hermes — open-source software (MIT-licensed) from Nous Research, running locally on your own AI provider. The box doesn't phone home to do its job; our servers are only for warranty, support, and that encrypted backup. So even if MangoTart the company vanished tomorrow, your box would keep working. You're not renting access that someone can turn off.
Your data is yours to take
Changed your mind about the hardware but want to keep your agent? One click exports the whole thing — memory, skills, settings, chat history — as a standard Hermes backup. Import it into another MangoTart, or into any machine running open-source Hermes. No lock-in, no data held hostage.
Taking your data elsewhere
Box-to-box migration is guaranteed. Moving to other hardware is best-effort — Hermes is open source and runs in plenty of places, but the path we promise is MangoTart to MangoTart. Your export also holds secrets in plain text (API keys, logins, chats), so treat the file like a password.
A real agent — and it gets sharper the more you use it
ChatGPT and Claude talk. Hermes does: it plans, uses tools, browses the web on your logged-in accounts, and runs tasks on a schedule — a full agent harness, not a chat box. It's also self-improving: it writes new skills from experience, remembers what matters, and builds a deeper model of you every session. Most chat assistants reset; Hermes compounds. It's the strongest open-source agent framework out there — and it's the one in your box.
Ready to set one up? See the quick start.