Why I built Node Neo.
This started as a personal project. It became the AI client I use every day — and how I cancelled most of my subscription bills. Here's the why, the goal, and where it's going.
Morpheus was great. Getting in was unusable.
The Morpheus-Lumerin-Node project has progressed fast. The protocol works, the providers work, the on-chain economics work. But for a regular person, getting in meant: install a node, configure it, make or import a wallet, fund it, point it at the right server, and debug whatever broke. That was a wall. If you weren't already comfortable in the space, you didn't get past it.
I wanted a single, embedded, cohesive client. One app. Open it, create a wallet, chat. Everything chain-side hidden behind a thin layer that just works.
Privacy that holds up under real-life prompts.
TEE-attested models — Max Privacy, in app terms — are great in principle. But there wasn't a UX where you could honestly drop a medical record, a financial statement, or a question you'd never want logged against your name — and feel confident about where it went. The Morpheus API Gateway helps people understand the network, but it's still a centralized hop.
Self-custody + TEE-attested inference + a polished consumer client = the missing piece. Nothing centralized between you and the provider; conversations encrypted at rest with a wallet-derived key; no copy of your chats on our side, and no support desk that can reset your wallet.
I was paying four AI subscriptions. I want zero.
Grok. ChatGPT. GitHub Copilot. Cursor (with Claude). The bills add up — for me, and for the team. Each of those is a great product. Each is also a permanent monthly bill, paid forever, on someone else's servers, with the price ratchet always going up.
With Node Neo on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, I have a chatbot that handles the questions I used to send to Grok and ChatGPT. Strong open models from an open market, not a monthly seat.
Concrete progress
ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions: cancelled. I kept one small Grok plan, and it now leans on open models from Morpheus through Node Neo and Uplink, an open-source gateway to Morpheus models. I pay the big AI companies less, use more AI than ever, and keep more of it private.
The AI Gateway is the developer escape hatch.
The Mac app (in TestFlight beta while Apple reviews it) includes an AI Gateway with Pro: an OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoint served from your own machine. Configure your IDE the way you'd configure any other OpenAI-compatible model: paste a local URL and an API key. Zed, Cursor, Continue, Cline, LangChain, LlamaIndex: anything that takes that interface should work. (Cursor needs a small MCP add-on, because it sends custom-model requests through its own servers.)
Stake some MOR and you can point your editor at coding models like
Qwen3-Coder and GLM-5.1 all day, with no Cursor or Anthropic
bill. (The Gateway is part of Node Neo Pro on Mac.) Want more parallel agents? Stake more MOR. Stake, not spend
— you don't lose the MOR, you just hold more of it. And you can switch which
model your IDE talks to whenever a better one shows up on the network.
Concrete progress
I've been running Zed instead of Cursor for a few weeks now, pointed at my local Node Neo gateway. Once file attachments and image processing ship, I can drop Cursor entirely.
Freedom from the swipe-card-every-month tax.
You buy MOR once. Each chat locks a tiny piece as a right-to-use stake, and it comes back to your wallet after the session. The same MOR funds the next chat. The next thousand chats. It's a library card on the Morpheus network — in your wallet forever, lets you check out as many "books" (sessions) as you want against the same loan. ETH is the postage stamps you use to mail each request through the network — cents per use, the only piece that genuinely depletes.
Heavier usage over time = more MOR locked at once (more parallel sessions, more agents). Chatting never turns into a monthly bill: MOR opens sessions, ETH covers network fees, and there's no account to suspend. Pro is optional. It adds the full catalog and app features, never chat time, and you can skip it. And as more providers on the Morpheus network run inside a TEE, Max Privacy has more models to choose from. Your conversation stays your conversation.
A few items on the roadmap that earn their place here.
Not everything we're building — just the items that ladder directly into the thesis above.
- File attachments + image processing. The two missing pieces between Node Neo and a complete Cursor replacement. Drop in a codebase or a screenshot, get help on it from a Morpheus model.
- Linux build + AI Gateway. Brings the developer escape hatch to where most developer workflows actually live.
- An easier way to get MOR. Today you buy ETH on Coinbase or MoonPay and swap it on Uniswap. We want fewer steps, while keeping ID checks with the payment provider and out of Node Neo.
- Plain-language model labels. Today the model list is hard to read if you don't know model names. Categories, taglines, and a starter recommendation make "pick a model" boring instead of intimidating.
- Neo, an on-device assistant. A small helper that runs on your own device, for quick questions that never need to leave it. It's on the roadmap, not in the app yet.
- More TEE-attested model coverage. The privacy story improves every time a new provider attests their hardware. Max Privacy mode keeps getting more useful as the network grows.
If your AI subscription bills look like mine did, this might be your exit too.
Try it. Start your first chat. Chatting uses MOR you stake on-chain, not another monthly AI bill. Node Neo Pro is optional. It's an App Store subscription for the full catalog and app features. Chats run on the MOR you stake and a little ETH for network fees, never on Pro. If it doesn't replace anything yet, the wallet still works in MetaMask, Rainbow, or any standard wallet. It cost you a few cents in network fees. If it does, you've found a way out.
Stake MOR in the Node Neo builder pool.
Morpheus has a clean answer for "support a project without writing a check": stake MOR in the Node Neo builder pool. The stake increases my yield as a builder, which directly funds the development time and hosting costs that keep this app going.
It's a stake, not a donation. Your MOR stays yours. Staked MOR is locked for 7 days. After that, unstake and it returns to your wallet (the dashboard shows the countdown).
Stake in the Node Neo pool →