benjamintnorris

Hi jstummbillig, I appreciate the feedback. We’re careful to state only that users can expect up to an 80% cost reduction when switching away from OpenAI. Our DeepSeek V4 Pro model is a good example of this.

Hi Luke - both points are fair and worth answering properly.

On the policy: you’re right, that wording is too loose for what we actually do. The inference path is UK-only - no model inference, no prompt or response data, leaves UK jurisdiction.

The “third parties outside the UK” language covers things like payment processing and standard SaaS sub-processors, not customer inference data, and it should say that. We'll be re-writing this next week!

Apologies - we had a lot of sudden traffic from Hackernews! We’re looking at it right now. Thanks for flagging.

Thank you! We'll check this out.

Civo isn’t a US company and isn’t a subsidiary of one. UK-incorporated since 2018, UK-resident leadership, no US parent, entirely UK founder owned. We also share the concern on the Azure/AWS “sovereign cloud”, but this doesn't apply here. The CLOUD Act reaches data held by US entities regardless of where the servers sit, which is exactly why those offerings are problematic. We’re outside that jurisdiction by corporate structure, not just geography.

For the very hardest reasoning tasks GPT-5 and Opus are still ahead, no argument there. But what we see in practice is customers dropping in an open-source model and getting very similar results on 80-90% of real-world use cases — with significant cost savings and end-to-end UK data residency (which matters a lot for our enterprise and institutional customers). And on the consumer-hardware point: these are Blackwell GPUs in a UK datacentre, in a token factory architecture.

Completely agree - we’re really eager to work with any UK model lab that wants to make a difference!

relaxAI is a spin-out from Civo — UK-incorporated cloud provider, been around since 2018, founded by Mark Boost. Probably best known for managed Kubernetes (fmajid’s got it right downthread).

We spun out in 2026 to focus on sovereign inference and UK workloads that need in-country processing. UK-resident founders. Not a UK subsidiary of a foreign hyperscaler or model provider — wholly UK-owned and operated, running in Civo’s LON1 datacentre.

ICO-registered, NCSC-aligned, on G-Cloud via CCS. UK law and UK courts only, no cross-border data flow at any layer. The majority of our customers are UK orgs where in-country processing is a hard requirement such as UK healthcare, legal and education companies.

We’re closely partnered with the LocAI model lab, we’re looking forward to running their models on the platform in the next few months!

Hi HN, I'm Ben, founding engineer at relaxAI.

We built a UK sovereign inference provider for developers who are either paying too much for OpenAI/Claude tokens or can't use US hyperscalers due to data residency requirements.

The short version: drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, latest open source models (Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Nemotron 3 Super, GPT OSS 120b), running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK. Zero code changes to switch from OpenAI. Up to 80% cheaper per token cost saving!

We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction. For anyone building in regulated sectors — finance, legal, health, defence — that matters a lot. But honestly, most of our early users just came for the huge cost savings.

We're looking for developers to kick the tyres. Check out our API docs at relax.ai/docs. I'd love your feedback and happy to answer any questions.