FAQ
Common questions, answered plainly.
Private Chief is a managed AI chief-of-staff service for your personal life and your businesses. One membership covers a household and any number of businesses, each with its own separately named conversational Chief and its own workspace, on one dedicated server we host and care for. You get personal apps, ongoing engineering care, and nothing to install.
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 optional layer, through a Home Assistant box, that can be added later.
Yes, through the optional Home Assistant box: a small Home Assistant Green that sits beside your router. Home Assistant is the device layer underneath, reaching devices across Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread and Wi-Fi, including supported Control4 and Lutron systems, and your Chief, on your dedicated server, works through it. You do not administer it: you talk to your Chief, and standing instructions remain visible in PrivateChief. Without the box, your Chief does not control devices in the house. If you already run Home Assistant yourself, mention it at your consultation; setup currently installs its own clean instance rather than taking over yours.
In the Private Chief app for iPhone and iPad (App Store), Android (Google Play), and Mac — all available from our Apps & Downloads page — and on optional wall units in the rooms you choose. Members receive personal invitations rather than sharing one household login.
Yes. One membership covers every household in your family, such as a second home or a parent’s home, at no extra membership fee. Each has its own private household workspace and its own Chief.
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.
Your working record lives on your dedicated server in a PrivateChief-controlled United States cloud account, kept apart from every other customer, and each business on that server keeps its own separate workspace. With the optional Home Assistant box, your home devices and their settings are managed on that box in your house. 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.
Your Chief runs on your hosted server, so the apps and wall units need an internet connection to reach it. If you have the optional Home Assistant box, its own automations and switches keep working in the house during an outage. Work that requires an unavailable service is queued or clearly reported rather than guessed.
Your information leaves with you. Our continuity pledge, which is section 24 of the Service Agreement, promises at least 90 days' written notice; a complete export in open formats (conversations, calendar, contacts, documents in their original files, and spreadsheet and JSON records), which you can also ask for at any time while you are a customer; Home Assistant left working on your Home Assistant box, with its owner login handed to you; and a copy of your hosted server in your own Amazon Web Services account on request, with our access removed. The Chief itself would stop: the apps, voice, messages, calls and updates all run through our systems.
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.
One membership is $199/month. It covers your household and any number of businesses, each with its own Chief and its own workspace, on one dedicated server we host. A second household in the family, such as a parent’s home, is included at no extra fee. Setup is a fixed $299, once. 25 GB of storage is included; each additional 25 GB is $5/month, and a bigger server for websites or heavy work is $49/month more. Wall units and a Home Assistant box are optional equipment you buy directly. See Pricing for the full breakdown.
No. Members who joined at an earlier price keep it for as long as they stay. Moving to the new membership is your choice, whenever it suits you.
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. With optional wall units and a Home Assistant box, it is also in the rooms of your house and can run compatible home systems. See Compare for a full side-by-side, or PrivateChief vs. ChatGPT for the detailed ChatGPT comparison.
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. Every membership runs on a dedicated server we host, with 25 GB of storage included and a fixed $299 setup. Wall units and a Home Assistant box are optional: add them if you want hands-free conversation in the rooms you choose or control of compatible home devices. Without the box, your Chief does not control devices in the house.
Yes, with no setup fee and no extra membership cost. Each business gets its own fully separate workspace: its own Books, contacts, tools, documents, customer desk, Chief, and members. The businesses share only the server they run on, and nothing from one appears in another. If one company has several brands, those can live together in that company’s workspace. If your server starts running short, a bigger one is $49/month more.
