Why We Built Edgible: Small Tech, Small AI, Anti-SaaS

The Impossible Choice

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, we watched thousands of businesses face an impossible choice:

Use AI and risk everything - Upload your client data, your proprietary knowledge, your competitive secrets to servers controlled by Big Tech.

Or fall behind - Watch your competitors embrace AI while you stick with outdated tools, slowly losing ground.

For most businesses, this wasn’t really a choice at all. They held their breath, crossed their fingers, and uploaded their data anyway. After all, everyone else was doing it, right?

But for professional services firms - law firms, medical practices, consulting agencies - the stakes were different. They couldn’t just “hope for the best” with client confidentiality. Attorney-client privilege isn’t negotiable. HIPAA compliance isn’t optional. Client trust, once broken, doesn’t come back.

So they watched from the sidelines, unable to participate in the AI revolution happening all around them.

That’s when we realized: Big AI has the same problem as Big Tech and Big SaaS.

They all follow the same playbook:

Build something powerful
Make it centralized
Require dependency
Extract recurring payments
Control your data
Make exit painful

And that playbook? It doesn’t work for everyone.

Especially not for businesses that can’t afford to give away their competitive secrets.

The Great AI Commoditization

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about AI in 2024:

Everyone has access to the same AI.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - they’re available to everyone. Your competitors use the same models you do. They have access to the same capabilities, the same features, the same “intelligence.”

So how do you differentiate? How do you build a competitive advantage when everyone’s using the exact same AI tools?

The answer Big Tech wants you to believe: pay for their enterprise tier, use their fine-tuning, upload more of your data to their systems.

But that’s not differentiation. That’s just deeper dependency.

The Real Secret Sauce: Your Data

Here’s what Big Tech doesn’t want you to realize:

The competitive advantage isn’t in the AI itself - it’s in the data you feed it.

Think about it:

A law firm with 20 years of specialized case precedents
A medical practice with decades of patient outcomes and treatment insights
A consulting firm with proprietary methodologies and client success patterns
An accounting firm with deep knowledge of specific industry compliance nuances

That data - YOUR data - is the secret sauce.

It’s what makes your AI different from everyone else’s AI. It’s what turns a generic chatbot into a specialized expert. It’s what transforms commodity AI into a genuine competitive advantage.

But here’s the catch: to unlock that advantage with Big Tech AI, you have to give away your secret sauce.

You have to upload it. Share it. Trust that it stays private (even though terms of service are vague). Hope it doesn’t leak (even though breaches happen). Assume it won’t be used for training (even though policies change).

That’s the trap.

Small Tech vs Big Tech: A David and Goliath Story

Big Tech built an incredible AI infrastructure. Massive data centers. Cutting-edge models. Global scale.

And then they did what Big Tech always does: they made you dependent on it.

Want to use AI? Upload your data to our servers.
Want better results? Fine-tune on our platform.
Want to scale? Pay for our enterprise tier.
Want to leave? Good luck migrating everything.
Oh, and you’ll be paying us monthly. Forever.

This is the Big Tech playbook: build something amazing, then trap you in it.

SaaS companies perfected this model:

Monthly subscriptions that never end
Data that can’t be exported
Features you can’t turn off
Analytics that track everything you do
“Upgrades” you never asked for

The entire SaaS industry is basically a really expensive rental agreement for software you’ll never own.

But here’s what makes this era different: AI doesn’t have to work that way.

AI can run on your own hardware. Language models can be deployed locally. Your data can stay on your infrastructure while still powering sophisticated AI capabilities.

The technology exists. It’s just that Big Tech has no interest in telling you about it.

And SaaS companies? They’re definitely not going to tell you that you don’t need to rent from them forever.

How Small Businesses Actually Compete

Let’s get practical. Here’s how a small business actually competes in the age of AI:

The Wrong Way (Big Tech’s Way):

Use the same AI everyone else uses
Pay for generic “enterprise” features
Hope your prompts are better than your competitors'
Cross your fingers that your data stays private

Result: Marginal improvements at best. Data lock-in at worst.

The Right Way (The Edgible Way):

Deploy AI on your own infrastructure
Feed it YOUR proprietary data (which never leaves your control)
Train it on YOUR specialized knowledge
Build AI that’s uniquely yours, not a commodity

Result: True competitive advantage. Complete data sovereignty.

A Real Example: The Boutique Law Firm

Let’s talk about Bruce & Partners (not their real name), a Sydney law firm specializing in customer loyalty programs.

They have 20 years of specialized knowledge:

Loyalty program legal structures
Consumer law nuances
Compliance frameworks
Proprietary contract templates
Case precedents specific to their niche

With Big Tech AI:
They could upload all this to ChatGPT Enterprise, hope it stays confidential, and get marginally better document drafting. Maybe.

With Edgible:
They deploy AI on their own servers, feed it their complete knowledge base, and create an AI assistant that knows their practice as well as their senior partners do.

When a new associate joins, they get instant access to 20 years of institutional knowledge.
When a client asks a complex question, the AI can reference actual precedents from their practice.
When a senior partner retires, their expertise doesn’t walk out the door.

And the data never leaves their Sydney office.

That’s not just incremental improvement. That’s transformation.

The Motivation: Taking Back Control

So why did we build Edgible?

Because we’re tired of watching small businesses choose between AI innovation and data sovereignty.

Because we believe your competitive advantage shouldn’t require giving away your competitive secrets.

Because the best businesses aren’t the ones with the biggest AI budgets - they’re the ones with the deepest expertise, and they should be able to leverage it.

Because privacy isn’t a luxury feature. It’s a fundamental requirement.

Big AI, Big Tech, Big SaaS - Same Problem

Here’s the pattern we kept seeing:

Big AI says: Upload your data to our servers. We’ll make it smart.
Problem: Your competitive secrets become their training data.

Big Tech says: Store everything in our cloud. We’ll keep it safe.
Problem: Safe from everyone except them.

Big SaaS says: Subscribe monthly forever. We’ll keep adding features.
Problem: You can never leave, never own it, never really control it.

It’s the same playbook, just different products:

Centralize everything on their infrastructure
Make you dependent on their platform
Harvest your data for “insights”
Lock you into recurring payments
Track everything you do
Make exit painful or impossible

And the bigger they get, the worse it gets.

Because Big isn’t just about size - it’s about control. Their control over your data, your workflows, your costs, your roadmap.

Small Tech, Small AI, Anti-SaaS

So we built the opposite.

Small Tech - Not “scale to a billion users” tech. “Works for YOUR business” tech.

Small AI - Not centralized mega-models that need your data. Local AI that keeps your data.

Anti-SaaS - Not “pay us forever” software. “Buy what you need, own what you deploy” software.

Small doesn’t mean less powerful. It means:

Sized for actual businesses, not imaginary unicorns
Focused on sovereignty, not scale
Optimized for privacy, not surveillance
Built for users, not investors

This is the fundamental difference:

Big’s business model = Get as many users as possible, extract maximum value from each one, make exit impossible.

Small’s business model = Serve users well, charge fairly, make ownership possible.

One of these models requires controlling your data and locking you in.
The other doesn’t.

We chose the other.

The Anti-SaaS SaaS Company

Here’s where we get a bit quirky.

Edgible is technically a SaaS company. But we’re basically the anti-SaaS.

Think about everything you hate about modern SaaS:

Traditional SaaS:

Your data lives on their servers → We keep it on YOUR servers
Monthly subscriptions you can’t escape → We sell tokens you buy when you need them
Forced upgrades and feature changes → You control your own deployment
Constant surveillance (“analytics”) → We literally CAN’T see what you do
Vendor lock-in → You can deploy our entire platform yourself

We built the opposite of that.

The Token Model (No Subscription Traps)

We don’t want you paying us every month forever. That’s the SaaS trap.

Instead, you buy tokens for what you need:

Need an SSL certificate? Buy a token.
Want managed services? Buy a token.
Done with it? Don’t buy another token.

No auto-renewal. No “contact sales to cancel.” No surprise charges.

Your tokens expire? Your services keep running - you just can’t make changes until you get a new token.

Graceful degradation, not hostage situations.

The Privacy Model (We Don’t Want Your Data)

Here’s what really makes us different:

We don’t want to know what you’re doing.

That’s not us being polite. That’s our actual business model.

Most SaaS companies are in the data harvesting business disguised as software. They need to know everything you do so they can:

Sell you more features
Mine usage patterns
Build “AI insights”
Track every click

We can’t do that because we literally don’t know what you’re hosting.

All we see:

Your email address
Your Stripe billing data

That’s it.

We don’t know what applications you’re running. What data you’re processing. Who your clients are. What your AI is learning.

And we like it that way.

Because your business is YOUR business. Not ours. Not Big Tech’s.

The Small Tech Advantage

This is what Small Tech understands that Big Tech doesn’t:

Not every business needs to scale to a billion users.

A law firm doesn’t need to serve the entire world. A medical practice doesn’t need global data centers. A consulting firm doesn’t need to process petabytes of data.

They need AI that works for THEM. On THEIR infrastructure. With THEIR data. Under THEIR control.

Big Tech can’t profitably serve that market. Their business model requires massive scale, centralized infrastructure, subscription revenue, and data harvesting.

But those constraints? They’re actually our opportunity.

Small Tech can build for the businesses Big Tech ignores. We can prioritize privacy over surveillance. Data sovereignty over network effects. User control over platform lock-in. Token sales over subscription addiction.

We can build AI infrastructure that actually serves businesses, not just harvests their data.

The Real Competitive Advantage

After everything we’ve learned building Edgible, here’s what we know for certain:

In the age of AI, competitive advantage doesn’t come from the AI itself.

It comes from:

Your proprietary data - the knowledge only you have
Your specialized expertise - what makes you different
Your client relationships - the trust you’ve built
Your data sovereignty - your ability to keep control

Big Tech’s AI can be powerful. But it’s also generic, commoditized, and available to everyone.

YOUR AI - running on your infrastructure, trained on your data, embodying your expertise - that’s irreplaceable.

That’s the future we’re building. One where small businesses can compete with big ones. Where expertise matters more than budget. Where data sovereignty enables innovation instead of preventing it.

Why This Matters Now

The AI revolution is happening whether we like it or not.

And right now, Big AI, Big Tech, and Big SaaS are writing the rules:

Your data belongs on their servers
Monthly subscriptions are inevitable
Surveillance is necessary for “better service”
Exit is painful by design

Businesses are being forced to choose:

Path 1: Embrace Big
Upload your data. Accept the subscriptions. Hope they don’t abuse your trust. Cross your fingers about data breaches. Pray the terms of service don’t change.

Path 2: Ignore AI
Stay with outdated tools. Watch competitors pull ahead. Eventually become irrelevant.

Path 3: Small Tech, Small AI, Anti-SaaS
Keep your data. Buy tokens, not subscriptions. Deploy locally. Own your infrastructure. Build real competitive advantages.

Businesses that figure out how to leverage AI while protecting their competitive advantages will thrive.

Businesses that just upload their data to Big Tech and hope for the best will commoditize themselves.

And businesses that sit on the sidelines, paralyzed by the impossible choice? They won’t survive.

Edgible is the third path.

The one where you don’t have to choose between AI innovation and data sovereignty.
The one where your proprietary data becomes your competitive moat, not your liability.
The one where Small Tech wins because it actually understands what businesses need - which is the opposite of what Big Tech is selling.

Join Us

We’re building this in the open. Open-source core. Token-based pricing. No subscription traps. No data harvesting.

You can deploy our entire platform yourself. You can stop paying us whenever you want. We genuinely don’t care what you’re hosting (because we can’t see it anyway).

This might be the worst SaaS business model ever.

But it’s the best model for you.

Because if there’s one thing the age of AI has taught us, it’s this:

The businesses that will thrive aren’t the ones with the biggest AI budgets or the longest vendor contracts.

They’re the ones with the deepest expertise and the courage to keep it private.

No monthly subscriptions. No data surveillance. No vendor lock-in.

Just you, your data, and your competitive advantage.

Host your own way.

About Edgible

Edgible is the anti-SaaS platform for privacy-first AI. We enable businesses to deploy AI applications on their own infrastructure with no monthly subscriptions, no data harvesting, and no vendor lock-in. Buy tokens for what you need, deploy our entire platform yourself, and keep your competitive secrets actually secret. We literally can’t see what you’re doing - and we like it that way. Learn more at www.edgible.com.

Small Tech, Small AI, Anti-SaaS. Built for businesses that can’t afford to give Big Tech their competitive secrets.

Want to talk about this? Have questions about self-hosted AI? Contact us at stefano@edgible.com