relay

Relay is a bot that you text, and it sends an autonomous agent plus a self-hosted browser to fetch and process data from any app, then texts you back. It is built on its own browser engine called anvil-engine, avoiding third-party browser vendors like Browserbase, Browserless, or Steel. The MVP runs on free infrastructure: Telegram for messaging, a free-tier LLM (Gemini), and self-hosted anvil-engine (real Chrome).

The system architecture involves a Telegram user sending text to the Telegram Bot API, which long-polls a Relay worker (Node/TS). The worker runs an agent loop using Gemini (swappable with Claude), with tools for scraping, browsing, extracting, comparing, searching, and fetching JSON. It maintains persistent per-chat memory and safety caps, and connects to anvil-engine via puppeteer.connect or REST. The self-hosted browser approach yields sub-second latency and zero marginal cost per session on an Oracle Always-Free VM.

Relay can handle a wide range of tasks via text. It can fetch and read web pages, answer open questions with web search, extract structured data as JSON, compare prices across links, search then fetch, hit JSON APIs directly, and take screenshots or save PDFs. It also provides instant keyless answers for weather, prices, math, units, words, facts, time, dates, and utilities. Proactive features include reminders, schedules, recipes, digests, and change alerts. It refuses to pay, buy, or take destructive actions, and stays logged-out by default, though specific sites can be authorized via cookies. An opt-in approve-to-act mode allows committing clicks after user approval.