HonesTea 🍵

Download the APK · Landing page · Get an OpenRouter key

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A local-first, bring-your-own-key AI chat harness for Android & iOS. One OpenRouter key unlocks 400+ models — and the app tells you exactly what every message costs.

No account. No server. No subscription. Your keys and your chats live in your pocket and nowhere else.

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Why

Most chat apps hide the meter. HonesTea is built around showing it to you: every reply is stamped with the real tokens and real dollars it cost, every model's price is live from OpenRouter's catalog, and the built-in Auto mode picks the cheapest model that can actually handle each message — vision when you attach an image, tool-capable when web search is on, enough context for the whole conversation.

Features

• 400+ models via one OpenRouter key — Fable, GPT-6 Astra, Kimi K3, GLM, DeepSeek, and the whole open-weights world
• Auto routing — cheapest capable model per message, with graceful fallbacks
• Honest costs — per-message USD (real usage, not estimates), per-model lifetime spend, a savings card vs. flagship pricing
• Stop for real — abort mid-stream; you keep the partial reply and only pay for what streamed
• Context compaction — long chats get summarized automatically at 80% of the model's window instead of silently breaking
• Web search / fetch / date-time tools with a live activity panel and citation chips
• Regenerate with version history — flip between replies; superseded versions still count in cost totals (they were real spend)
• Images & PDFs in, voice dictation and read-aloud out
• Local-only — SQLite on device, keys in the iOS Keychain / Android Keystore, full-text search across chats, works offline for history

Getting started

1. Get an OpenRouter key

Sign up at openrouter.ai/keys — pay-as-you-go, no subscription. Most chats cost fractions of a cent.

2. Get the app

Android: grab the latest APK from Releases (built automatically by CI on every merge to main).

iOS / development: install Expo Go, then

pnpm install
pnpm dev:app

and scan the QR code with your phone.

3. Paste your key, pick a model, talk.

The default is a balanced workhorse model; switch to anything in the header picker, or choose Auto and let the app route for you.

Building from source

pnpm install
npx expo prebuild -p android          # generate the native project
cd apps/app/android && ./gradlew assembleRelease

Requires Node 22+, pnpm 11, JDK 17–21, and an Android SDK. The release APK is signed with the debug keystore (fine for testing; not for store distribution).

Releases

CI does the building — never build locally to share an APK.

• Merge (or push) to main → GitHub Actions builds the release APK (arm64) and uploads it as a workflow artifact. Find it under Actions → Android preview APK → latest run. Artifacts require a GitHub login to download.

• Cut a public release → tag a commit and push the tag:

  git checkout main
  git pull
  git tag v0.1.0
  git push origin v0.1.0

  CI builds the APK and publishes it as a prerelease on the Releases page — publicly downloadable, no login needed. Bump the tag number for each release (v0.1.1, v0.2.0, …).

Repo layout

honestea/
├── apps/app/        Expo (SDK 57) / React Native app — the whole product
├── packages/shared/ Cost math, curated models, Auto routing engine
└── docs/            Landing page (GitHub Pages)

Privacy

Chats are stored in a local SQLite database. API keys are stored in the system keystore and sent only to OpenRouter over TLS. There is no backend to leak: this repo contains no server code at all. Delete the app and everything is gone.

License

Private project — all rights reserved until a license lands.