What happens when you stop paying it is. Here's how to tell whether your agent is actually yours — and what to do if it isn't.
If you pay for an AI assistant, you've probably wondered whether it's worth the money. That's the wrong question. The one that matters is what you still have when the payments stop.
An agent that lives on someone else's cloud is rented — the memory it built, the skill it accumulated, the permission to run at all. Cancel and it isn't a downgrade. It's gone.
You don't need a technical background to ask these. Most vendors don't volunteer the answers, so ask directly, in writing, while you can still walk away:
If the third answer is no, you're not buying a capability. You're renting access to it, on terms that can change without your consent.
The agent runtime in qbit.me is open source, and it runs on hardware you control — a small appliance, a Raspberry Pi, a Mac, or a Linux machine you already have. Your agent's memory, skills, and automations live there, not in a vendor's account you can't reach into.
Your accumulated context follows the same rule: extract it from ChatGPT, Claude, or Hermes, review every flagged piece yourself, attest what stays, and serve it to your agent from your own machine. Nothing reaches your agent that you didn't approve — and you can take it with you.
When the agent proposes a change to your work, it waits for your approval. Agent drafts, you attest. The judgment never leaves your hands.
There's no monthly subscription. You pay per call for the actions that consume compute — $0.013 for a gateway turn — with a free daily allowance on every action, and $5 in signup credit on a new account. An appliance starts at $300; if you already have a machine, the hardware cost is $0.
That's the honest trade: a smaller, more predictable bill in exchange for the runtime being yours. If a subscription you can cancel at will is what you actually want, a cloud assistant is the better purchase, and you should keep it.
Run those three questions against whatever you pay for today. Write down the answers. If the third one came back "no" and that bothers you, that's the moment to look at what owning it would take — not before.