AI providers
Choosing a provider
What LensHub uses a model for, and what happens without one.
What works without any provider
Search. LensHub ships with its own embedding model that runs locally, so finding things works out of the box with no API key and no external calls.
What needs a provider
- Chat — the built-in interface for asking questions in the browser
- Automatic tagging — sorting content into domains and topics
- Summarising conversations into something searchable
All optional. Plenty of instances run search-only.
Setting it up
Which one
| If you want | Use |
|---|---|
| The simplest thing that works | Any hosted OpenAI-compatible provider |
| Nothing to leave your network | A self-hosted model |
| Lowest cost | A small hosted model — the tasks are undemanding |
The work LensHub asks a model to do is bounded: tag this document, summarise this thread, answer from this retrieved material. A small, cheap model is usually fine. You do not need a frontier model here — your agent is where reasoning quality matters, and that runs wherever you put it.