MARVIN · A DIGITAL PERSON, HOSTED FOR YOU
Marvin is a persistent, stateful assistant that remembers your life — who your people are, what you promised, what changed since Tuesday — and acts on it. Not a widget you open, but someone who is already there. We run your copy on a machine of your own, at your own address, so there is nothing to keep switched on at home.
Kate is allergic to penicillin.
What makes him different
A chatbot answers the question in front of it. Marvin holds a life: the people in it, the promises in it, and the reasons behind what he believes — and he will show you his working.
Every fact Marvin holds carries where it came from, how confident he is, and when he learned it. You can browse it, correct it, ask what he believed last month, and tell him to forget — and forgetting reaches the copies, not just the original.
Calls, messages and contacts flow in and become a people graph — who matters, how you are connected, what is owed. Marvin does not just talk through your phone; he perceives through it, and what he takes in is reviewable and erasable line by line.
Anything that reaches the outside world — sending, spending, deleting, publishing — parks for your explicit sign-off. Tools he writes for himself are sandbox-tested first and registered only after you approve them. On by default, not a setting you must discover.
Eight dimensions of voice — directness, warmth, formality, humour and more — plus a live emotional state recorded turn by turn. He reads as the same person on Monday and Friday, and he reads as the person you asked for.
Goals, projects, tasks, habits, people and resources, held as real linked entities rather than notes in a chat log. He raises what is slipping before you ask, because he is watching the same board you are.
Everything durable is written to a git-versioned Obsidian vault you can open, read and walk away with. No proprietary store holding your life hostage — and encrypted backups run nightly to storage in a second location.
Honest comparison
Three products that all claim memory and autonomy. Here is where each actually stands — including the rows where we lose.
| Capability | Marvin | OpenClaw | Hermes Agent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs on hardware you control | ● Your own instance | ● Self-hosted | ● 100% self-hosted |
| Remembers you across sessions | ● Nine tiers | ● On-disk | ● On-disk |
| Open source | ○ Proprietary | ● MIT | ● MIT |
| Chat platforms it plugs into | ◐ Web, mobile, voice | ● 10+ platforms | ● 5 + CLI |
| Writes its own reusable skills | ● Approval-gated | ● Portable skills | ● Auto-authored |
| Asks permission before irreversible acts | ● On by default | ◐ Available, off by default | ? Not documented |
| Provenance + confidence on every fact | ● Per fact | ○ Plain notes | ○ Plain notes |
| Ask what it believed last month | ● Time-travel | ○ — | ○ — |
| Forgetting reaches the derived copies | ● Tombstoned | ○ — | ○ — |
| Phone calls & contacts as sensory input | ● People graph | ○ Chat transport | ○ Chat transport |
| Tunable persona + emotional state | ● 8 dimensions | ○ — | ○ — |
| Encrypted offsite backup + one-command restore | ● Nightly | ○ Your problem | ○ Your problem |
| Hosted for you — no machine to keep running | ● This service | ○ Self-host | ○ Self-host |
We are straight about where we lose. OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are both open source and both run locally — if that is the deciding factor, they are excellent and you should use them. OpenClaw reaches far more chat platforms than we do today. What we do differently is treat memory as something that must be auditable and correctable, and treat irreversible action as something that must be asked about rather than configured. Competitor claims checked against public documentation on 2026-08-09; where their docs are silent we say “not documented” rather than guessing.
Sources: OpenClaw Docs · OpenClaw — Exec approvals · OpenClaw — Gateway security · Hermes Agent (Nous Research)
How the beta works
Leave your name, your email and the subdomain you want. That is the whole form — no credit card, no call.
Each accepted tester gets their own machine, their own certificate and their own address. Nothing is shared with another tester — not the process, not the disk.
We email your address and a one-time token. You set an owner password on first sign-in, add your model keys, and from then on it is yours.
Beta access
Tell us where to put him. We review every request by hand and reply by email.