The companion that can't have its features taken away: Wittlet & Wittlet's World

By J.E. Herizon LLC · Published September 27, 2026

Cloud AI companions can change the deal after you have fallen for the character — features moved behind subscriptions, servers shut down, terms rewritten overnight. Wittlet is built so that cannot happen: a free, 100%-offline companion for Windows, with Wittlet's World, a cozy room that ships inside the same single download. No cloud, no account wall, no subscription.

The companion that can't have its features taken away

The history of the category is a warning. Replika's romantic features were silently switched off in 2023 after Italy's privacy regulator objected, and the company was fined €5 million under the GDPR in 2025. Kindroid's free Lite tier goes read-only in October 2026, while its MAX stacks run roughly $98–$114 a month. In both cases, the mechanism is the same: the personality lives on someone else's server, so someone else decides what it may do next week.

Wittlet's answer is architectural. The language model lives on your PC — Wittlet reads the machine, picks a model from 1.7B through 4B, prefers a GPU, and runs the same Q4 model on CPU; it never selects anything below 1.7B. Conversation calls the model at 127.0.0.1 — a loopback address that never leaves the machine — and the model itself is installed once as a local setup step. No profile and no transcript is ever sent off the PC. Conversations, preferences, the roster, game state, sparks and learning progress are stored on the device, encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM in a store that is hidden from Explorer.

That is the whole trust story: there is no server to change the deal, no cloud account to leak, no terms page to rewrite overnight. The companion is a companion, not a person — and, like any AI, it can be wrong, so the app's own standing advice applies: check important results.

Companion core: ten characters, eight colorways, on your terms

Wittlet is, first of all, a character that sits beside your work. There are ten, each with a distinct personality: Orbit (warm, witty), Scout (curious explorer), Sentinel (calm guardian), Ember (energetic motivator), Sage (thoughtful teacher), Lyra (creative dreamer), Bolt (focused builder), Bloom (gentle supporter), Jester (playful optimist), and Nova (confident visionary). Picking one is free, and you can switch.

Appearance is your call, not a paywall. Eight colorways — Glacier, Azure, Violet, Jade, Amber, Steel, Rose, and Sand — are available free per character, and beyond the colorways there are nine preset eye-and-shell colors plus an arbitrary custom color picker. Size scales from 15% to 160%, with eye size, body width, glow and motion speed each adjustable; there is a reduce-animation toggle, always-on-top, drag-to-move, a resizable chat panel, and tray behavior you choose (keep in tray, quit, or restore).

The app reads your hardware honestly. Compute runs in automatic mode (GPU → integrated → CPU) or CPU-only, and after each response Wittlet reports the GPU and CPU use it actually observed, so an underpowered machine never gets a silently oversized engine. Voice is explicit opt-in: you enable it, then explicitly start a recording, review the transcript before it is sent, and reading a reply aloud is its own action. No microphone is ever opened just by launching the app. If something does misbehave, there is an in-app issue-reporting path from inside the app.

Seven real games, played by real rules

Wittlet plays seven games — Chess, Checkers, Reversi, Connect Four, Gomoku, Kalah, and Pallanguzhi — by their real rules, with real move legality rather than a toy board. A closer game earns more sparks; beating the companion earns the most. The games are also the companion's economy: playing is how most sparks are earned, and the streaks and spins that follow (below) all trace back to sitting down and actually playing.

Fifteen courses with a placement quiz — lessons stay free

The companion also teaches. There are fifteen courses — English, Writing, Mathematics, Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth and sky, Python, Computers, Cisco IOS, Careful thinking, Logic, History, and Geography — each running through five levels from "I know nothing" through Foundations, Use it, Harder cases, and an Expert check. A placement quiz skips what you already know and turns misses into gaps you close before the next lesson. Lessons are free, and finishing every expert tree lets you choose one more character.

The courses are tutors with honest disclaimers on board — "not medical advice," "not a permit to mix cleaners" — not certifications. Python lessons are graded against an answer key, never by executing your code.

File help that asks before it touches anything

Wittlet can work with your files, on a short leash you control. You choose the action and the target; the app proposes the change; you review and approve before anything is saved. Existing files are never overwritten, filenames must be plain, and email replies are drafts that are never sent.

The safety rails are concrete. Wittlet never runs your files. Denied paths — your .ssh, .aws, .azure, .gnupg, .codex, and .claude folders, among others — are hard-blocked, and unsafe filenames (path traversal, reserved device names, control characters) are rejected outright. It is file help that cannot run away with your data.

Wittlet's World: the room is live, inside the same download

Wittlet's World is not a separate install and not a "coming soon" promise: the room opens from the companion, inside the one Microsoft Store download. The catalog runs to 100 rooms across ten room families — First Room, Greenhouse, Workshop, Orbital Cabin, Rain Studio, Pocket Library, Seaside Observatory, Night Loft, Courtyard, and Lantern Market — with one room starting free from the full list.

Starter furnishings are moveable into valid placement areas, with undo for your edits and a reset that first saves a recovery snapshot, so a failed room save never destroys the previous layout. The placeable catalog itself is 1,300 items, priced transparently from your own profile tags — a matching tag adds +25 sparks, shown as the price, with no fake "was/now" discount theater anywhere. The room reacts to you: characters have authored reactions to room objects and care — inspecting a row, dusting the keepsake shelf, admiring a memento, a finished job ringing the workshop bell. You choose how the app starts — a classic floating companion, a compact Nook, or the room itself — and a scene-only postcard exports the room without conversation text, task titles, or file names.

Care without death or debt

The care model is where Wittlet deliberately breaks with desktop-pet convention. Four gentle care actions map to real needs — rest and charge, read and explore, tidy and decorate, play — and those needs are explicitly fictional: closing the app never harms the companion and creates no care debt. Streaks advance when you open the app, keep it open, and care for the companion that day, multiplying that day's spark grant ×2 to ×5 — but motives decay over simulated time and never reach zero. The character does not die. A missed day is not a punishment; there is no shame loop and no streak-destroying tree to mourn.

Two offline play activities — repeating a visible color sequence at your own pace, and finding a highlighted object — are untimed, with accessible text choices, no sound-only cues, and no flashing. Completed rounds add bounded local sparks and leave a small keepsake placed in your room, with replay always available after the daily cap; reward claims are deduplicated so the same completion can't be minted twice. A local Moments view shows the latest keepsake and its memento plus recorded activities — read-only, local, and never exposing adult captions. Focus sessions settle you beside the companion with a calm, optional ambient timer; a completed timer records time — it does not certify that an assignment was done.

Family Mode is a local, parent-controlled setting: a simple on-device password gates the adult AI features for that session, its curated play mode shows no purchase prompts, clearing it takes effect instantly, and restarting returns to Family Mode — with zero cloud data transmission. JE Horizon describes it as a local family guardrail, not a child-safety certification. And free event spins on the prize wheel show their six chances before you spin, with nothing won able to be cashed out — disclosed odds, no paid loot boxes.

Sparks: an economy that never charges for usefulness

Sparks are the in-app currency, and the direction of the economy matters: usefulness earns, play earns, and nothing essential is ever charged for. Chatting, lookups, opening a file and editing a file earn sparks — harder work earns more. Games earn sparks; a closer game earns more and beating the companion earns the most. One spark is, in the app's own words, "spent as electricity." Education is never charged — the lessons are free, full stop.

Optional spark bundles only add sparks, at strictly better value per cent as they scale up:

The pricing page is explicit: "The app is free. A bundle only adds sparks. Nothing is charged until Stripe accepts the card." Bundles are sold through Stripe checkout on the website, not as a Microsoft Store add-on, and there are no crossed-out "was" prices anywhere. There is no subscription, no monthly anything — nothing in the product sits behind a recurring charge. The brand copy is "never rent a companion," and the Store reality matches it: a free full app plus flat, one-time, optional top-ups.

That is the whole catalog — and the whole point. Ten characters, eight colorways, seven real games, fifteen courses, scoped file help, and a living room you can sit in, all in one free download that runs without the internet. A companion, not a person — and one whose features nobody can take away.

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