Common questions, answered plainly.

Private Chief is a managed AI chief-of-staff service for personal life, a business, or both. Each customer gets a separately named conversational Chief, personal apps, ongoing engineering care, and a choice between fully hosted service with nothing to install or a private appliance at home or work.

No. Calendars, reminders, projects, research, calls and messages, lists, documents, bookings, personal accounts, and family coordination work without connected lights or appliances. Smart-home control is an additional layer that can be connected later.

The in-home option does. Home Assistant is the device layer Private Chief uses underneath on the private household hub, reaching devices across Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread and Wi-Fi, including supported Control4 and Lutron systems. You do not administer it: you talk to your Chief, and standing instructions remain visible in PrivateChief. Hosted Personal does not initially provide direct local-device control. If you already run Home Assistant yourself, mention it at your consultation; setup currently installs its own clean instance rather than taking over yours.

On managed wall units, and in the Private Chief app for iPhone and iPad (App Store), Android (Google Play), and Mac — all available from our Apps & Downloads page. Members receive personal invitations rather than sharing one household login.

Yes. Each residence has its own Chief, memory, devices, documents, and household context. Family members see only the homes they belong to and can switch between them in the app.

Yes, when the household has enabled the channel and the request is authorized. Your Chief can draft and send messages, place calls, contact providers, and carry bookings or projects forward. Consequential external communication, purchases, account changes, and sensitive home actions follow confirmation and consent rules.

It becomes a tracked Project with a next action and follow-up. Your Chief can continue the research or outreach in the background, notify you when it needs a decision, and send the result by the appropriate channel. Product or system problems are kept separately as Support requests.

No. Household-shared accounts and information are explicitly shared. Member-private connected accounts, personal details, and opted-in adult coaching remain scoped to that person. Recognition helps the system apply the correct profile; it does not make private information communal.

With an in-home appliance, the working household record lives on the private hub in the residence. With fully hosted service, it lives on the customer’s dedicated server in a PrivateChief-controlled United States cloud account. Limited audio, text, images, or relevant context may be processed by contracted services when needed to complete a request. Personal data is not sold or used to build advertising profiles. See Privacy & Oversight for the full boundary.

The in-home option keeps supported low-risk local essentials available where technically possible, such as basic home state and controls, timers, and connection troubleshooting. Hosted service requires an internet connection. Work that requires an unavailable cloud service is queued or clearly reported rather than guessed.

Ongoing updates are part of the service. Stable releases normally reach the household’s phones and managed wall units automatically. Experimental changes can be limited to selected test devices before the exact accepted release is promoted to everyone.

No. Private Chief is a white-glove managed service. We design and prepare the household, guide family onboarding, connect approved services, supervise updates, and remain available when a request or integration needs human engineering attention.

First choose what your Chief serves: Personal is $149/month, Business is $199/month, and Personal + Business is $299/month. Then choose where it runs. Fully hosted service has a fixed $299 onboarding fee and no equipment; an in-home or in-office installation is quoted for its actual equipment and setup. Additional households and businesses are $99 and $199/month. See Pricing for the full breakdown.

The monthly price covers the managed service itself. The AI capacity your Chief uses to listen, reason, and speak is billed separately, one month behind, on the same invoice. You choose how it's supplied: bring your own OpenAI account and pay OpenAI directly, or let us supply it at our cost plus thirty percent — there's no minimum and you can switch later. See Pricing for the full breakdown.

Yes. Talk with Alfred, a demonstration Chief running a simulated home, right in your browser — by text or voice, no signup or download required. He can turn on lights, manage a grocery list, book a reservation, and show you how a real Chief follows through, and he's honest that he's an AI demonstration.

A general chat service is not built around one managed household or company, while a smart speaker concentrates on devices and short requests. Private Chief retains your working context, observes member permissions, tracks work over days, and has real people responsible for keeping the service working. The in-home option also adds local household memory and direct home control. See Compare for a full side-by-side.

A full-time house manager typically runs well into six figures a year in salary and benefits, before taxes, payroll, or a search fee. Private Chief covers a similar range of day-to-day household support at fixed monthly pricing. See The Cost of a House Manager for a free calculator using current wage data, side by side with what Private Chief costs.

No. Personal, Business, and combined service can all be fully hosted on a dedicated server we run, with 25 GB of storage included and a fixed $299 onboarding fee. A private appliance remains available for customers who want the working record at their premises; for Personal service it also provides direct home control, local sensors and presence, room-based wall units, and supported offline essentials. Hosted Business is also available through Vibesies. The monthly membership price is the same either way.