Our promise, in full.

What Echidna is

Echidna is the open alternative to closed, corporate and expensive artificial intelligence assistants. It runs on open-source tools and on our own transparent infrastructure, with providers that do not retain your data (ZDR policies, zero data retention), located mostly in China and the United States.

The premise is simple: for 5 USD (100 MXN) per month we offer, at least, the same capabilities and intelligence as the best-known services, but in greater quantity, with more control of the environment, more transparency and more privacy.

Echidna is a product of NorthStar AI Agency, a digital engineering company specialized in software, cybersecurity and agentic artificial intelligence, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, with legal representation in the United States and Mexico.

Who it is for

For university students, workers in developing countries and, in general, for anyone who does not want or cannot pay the standard price of this class of services. Most people under-use the expensive paid plans, and free plans fall short: we offer what most people need, at a fair price.

It is also for teams and companies that use AI intensively, who can negotiate special contracts, and for universities, with customized plans and configurations. Education is, for us, the most important use case of AI.

What you can do with Echidna

• Talk and solve questions with long context, in your language.
• Work with documents: analyze, create, modify and extract data from PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
• Search the web with cited sources: you are told where every fact came from.
• Organize your work in projects, with their sources, instructions and memory.
• Schedule tasks so they work while you are away, with notices when they finish.
• Create documents, sheets, presentations, pages and canvases inside your account.

How it works, for you

There are two plans: Standard, 5 USD per month, with a generous amount of use; and Advanced, 50 USD per month, with practically unlimited use for heavy work. For extreme or corporate cases there are custom contracts.

You do not choose a model or a brand: Echidna decides the best combination to solve your request. Behind the scenes we commit to always serving you models with, at least, the intelligence level of these references:

Quantization or fine-tuning of the models is not in our hands: it depends entirely on the corresponding provider. What is ours is the selection by quality and cost, the environment, the cleanliness and the privacy.

How we are built

Echidna is built on OpenClaw, an open-source project with respectable engineering practices, starting from a stable and proven version. To that base we add a layer of customization, security auditing, optimization and compartmentalization to turn it into a production product.

Every person works inside their own isolated container on servers rented from Virtarix. Inference works as a proxy toward multiple providers with a private key per user, web search goes out over our own private network, and the infrastructure runs automatic cleanups every day.

See the full architecture →

What we work with

Transparency also means saying what everything is made with. These are the main pieces (without the guts that we are the ones who must protect):

• OpenClaw, the open-source base of the product, with our customization and security layer on top.
• Virtarix, the servers where the infrastructure lives.
• Docker, which gives every person their isolated space.
• Our inference router, which spreads requests among model providers with private keys per user and failover.
• PostgreSQL, where accounts, plans and spending live (never the content of your conversations).
• SearXNG over a private network between servers, for web search.
• WireGuard for the internal tunnels and Cloudflare for the domain, the site and its protection.
• Stripe, the payment gateway; your card never passes through our servers.
• OpenCode and the rest of our engineering arsenal to develop, verify and maintain all of this.

Privacy and cybersecurity

It is the strongest policy of the project and it will not change: no data, message, file, activity, log or digital fingerprint that you generate is sold or used for anything other than serving you the answer. The data belongs to the user; it is the promise we are most proud of.

• The tools that run your requests have telemetry disabled and custom privacy settings.
• Your requests are sent only to providers with zero-retention policies. We cannot guarantee third-party compliance, but our own compliance is guaranteed.
• The infrastructure cleans every day: your files are used during inference and are permanently deleted from our servers; we do not keep the files, but the context.
• If you want to keep your files for a given time, you can choose that yourself. It is never an imposition of the service.
• Every user lives in a lightweight container isolated from the rest, with measures against prompt injection and container escapes.

Read the privacy promise → · See the security architecture →

How it is sustained

Echidna is not a company burning billions of dollars per quarter. It is a project that runs on open source and acts as a proxy to APIs with a strong cost-performance ratio, taking care of the infrastructure, the maintenance and the development for you.

NorthStar aims for Echidna to be self-sustaining while it brings in clients for the agency. That is why there are two clear plans and none free: we prefer to charge a little, up front, instead of throttling what you can do. The Advanced plan, together with the agreements for companies and universities, is the one that sustains the operation.

Vision, origin and values

We want to bring cutting-edge agentic artificial intelligence to every corner of the world, regardless of budget, in an ethical, safe and private way, with a strong focus on education.

Our wish is to teach Latin America and the Spanish-speaking countries the responsible, technical and productive use of this technology, from the most basic to the most advanced. We believe it is a step in the right direction for all of humanity: it creates jobs, improves quality of life and accelerates scientific progress.

Team and development

Behind Echidna is NorthStar AI Agency: funding, legal support, human resources and infrastructure fall on the parent company. Development relies on our own tools, open source and inference providers chosen by quality and cost.

We contribute to open-source projects and we keep the attributions of all the third-party software we use. See attributions →